Introduction to Game Design,

Prototyping, and Development

Third Edition

Jeremy Gibson Bond

 
 Contents 
 Foreword 
Preface 
Part I. Game Design and Paper Prototyping 
Chapter 1. Thinking Like a Designer 
Chapter 2. Game Analysis Frameworks 
Chapter 3. The Layered Tetrad 
Chapter 4. The Inscribed Layer 
Chapter 5. The Dynamic Layer 
Chapter 6. The Cultural Layer 
Chapter 7. Acting Like a Designer 
Chapter 8. Design Goals 
Chapter 9. Paper Prototyping 
Chapter 10. Game Testing 
Chapter 11. Math and Game Balance 
Chapter 12. Guiding the Player 
Chapter 13. Puzzle Design 
Chapter 14. The Agile Mentality 
Chapter 15. The Digital Game Industry 
Part II. Programming C# in Unity 
Chapter 16. Thinking in Digital Systems 
Chapter 17. Introducing Unity HUB and The Unity Editor 
Chapter 18. Introducing Our Language: C# 
Chapter 19. Hello World: Your First Program 
Chapter 20. Variables and Components 
Chapter 21. Boolean Operations and Conditionals 
Chapter 22. Loops 
Chapter 23. Collections in C# 
Chapter 24. Functions and parameters 
Chapter 25. Debugging 

Chapter 26. Classes

Chapter 27. Object-Oriented Thinking

Chapter 28. Data-Oriented Design

Part III. Game Prototype Tutorials

Chapter 29. Apple Picker

Chapter 30. Mission Demolition

Chapter 31. Space shmup – Part 1

Chapter 32. Space shmup – Part 2

Chapter 33. Prospector Solitaire – Part 1

Chapter 34. Prospector Solitaire – Part 2

Chapter 35. Dungeon Delver – Part 1

Chapter 36. Dungeon Delver – Part 2

Part IV. Next Steps (Online only)

Chapter 37. Coding Challenges

Chapter 38. Beyond This Book

Part V. Appendices

Appendix A. Standard Project Setup Procedure

Appendix B. Useful Concepts

Appendix C. Online Reference

Appendix D. Tips for Teaching from This Book

 
 Table of Contents 
 Foreword 
Preface 
Part I. Game Design and Paper Prototyping 
Chapter 1. Thinking Like a Designer 
You Are a Game Designer 
Bartok: A Game Exercise 
The Definition of Game 
Summary 
Chapter 2. Game Analysis Frameworks 
Common Frameworks for Ludology 
MDA: Mechanics, Dynamics, and Aesthetics 
Formal, Dramatic, and Dynamic Elements 
The Elemental Tetrad 
Summary 
Chapter 3. The Layered Tetrad 
The Inscribed Layer 
The Dynamic Layer 
The Cultural Layer 
The Responsibility of the Designer 
Summary 
Chapter 4. The Inscribed Layer 
Inscribed Mechanics 
Inscribed Aesthetics 
Inscribed Narrative 
Inscribed Technology 
Summary 
Chapter 5. The Dynamic Layer 
The Role of the Player 
Emergence 

Dynamic Mechanics 
Dynamic Aesthetics 
Dynamic Narrative 
Dynamic Technology 
Summary 
Chapter 6. The Cultural Layer 
Beyond Play 
Cultural Mechanics 
Cultural Aesthetics 
Cultural Narrative 
Cultural Technology 
Authorized Transmedia Are Not Part of the Cultural Layer 
The Cultural Impact of a Game 
Summary 
Chapter 7. Acting Like a Designer 
Iterative Design 
Innovation 
Brainstorming and Ideation 
Changing Your Mind 
Scoping! 
Summary 
Chapter 8. Design Goals 
Design Goals: An Incomplete List 
Designer-Centric Goals 
Player-Centric Goals 
Summary 
Chapter 9. Paper Prototyping 
The Benefits of Paper Prototyping 
Paper Prototyping Tools 
Paper Prototyping for Interfaces 
A Paper Prototype Example 
Best Uses for Paper Prototyping 
Poor Uses for Paper Prototyping 
Summary 

Chapter 10. Game Testing

Why Playtest?

Being a Great Playtester Yourself

The Circles of Playtesters

Methods of Playtesting

Other Important Types of Testing

Summary

Chapter 11. Math and Game Balance

The Meaning of Game Balance

The Importance of Spreadsheets

Examining Dice Probability with Sheets

The Math of Probability

Randomizer Technologies in Paper Games

Weighted Distributions

Weighted Probability in Google Sheets

Permutations

Using Sheets to Balance Weapons

Positive and Negative Feedback

Summary

Chapter 12. Guiding the Player

Direct Guidance

Indirect Guidance

Teaching New Skills and Concepts

Summary

Chapter 13. Puzzle Design

Scott Kim on Puzzle Design

The Steps of Solving a Puzzle

Puzzle Examples in Action Games

Designing and Developing Puzzle Games

Summary

Chapter 14. The Agile Mentality

The Manifesto for Agile Software Development

Scrum Methodology

Burndown Chart Example

Creating Your Own Burndown Charts

Summary

Chapter 15. The Digital Game Industry

About the Game Industry

Game Education

Getting Into the Industry

Don’t Wait to Start Making Games!

Summary

Part II. Programming C# in Unity

Chapter 16. Thinking in Digital Systems

Systems Thinking in Board Games

An Exercise in Simple Instructions

Game Analysis: Apple Picker

Summary

Chapter 17. Introducing Unity HUB and The Unity Editor

Downloading Unity

Introducing Our Development Environment

Creating a Unity Account

Checking Out a Sample Project

Creating Your First Unity Project

Learning Your Way Around Unity

Setting Up the Unity Window Layout

Summary

Chapter 18. Introducing Our Language: C#

Understanding the Features of C#

Reading and Understanding C# Syntax

Summary

Chapter 19. Hello World: Your First Program

Creating a New Project

Making a New C# Script

Making Things More Interesting

Summary

Chapter 20. Variables and Components

Introducing Variables

Statically Typed Variables in C#

Important C# Variable Types

The Scope of Variables

Naming Conventions

Important Unity Variable Types

Unity GameObjects and Components

Summary

Chapter 21. Boolean Operations and Conditionals

Booleans

Comparison Operators

Conditional Statements

Summary

Chapter 22. Loops

Types of Loops

Set Up a Project

while Loops

do…while Loops

for Loops

foreach Loops

Jump Statements within Loops

Summary

Chapter 23. Collections in C#

C# Collections

Using Generic Collections

List<T>

Dictionary<Tkey, TValue>

Array

Multidimensional Arrays

Jagged Arrays

Jagged List<T>s

Choosing Whether to Use an Array or List

Summary

Chapter 24. Functions and parameters

Setting Up the Function Examples Project

Definition of a Function

What Happens When You Call a Function?

Function Parameters and Arguments

Returning Values

Returning void

Function Naming Conventions

Why Use Functions?

Function Overloading

Optional Parameters

The params Keyword

Recursive Functions

Summary

Chapter 25. Debugging

Getting Started with Debugging

Stepping Through Code with the Debugger

Summary

Chapter 26. Classes

Understanding Classes

Class Inheritance

Summary

Chapter 27. Object-Oriented Thinking

The Object-Oriented Metaphor

An Object-Oriented Boids Implementation

Summary

Chapter 28. Data-Oriented Design

The Theory of Data-Oriented Design

DOTS Tutorial and Example

The Future of Unity DOTS

Summary

Part III. Game Prototype Tutorials

Chapter 29. Apple Picker

What You Will Learn

The Apple Picker Prototype

The Purpose of a Digital Prototype

Preparing

Coding the Apple Picker Prototype

GUI and Game Management

Summary

Chapter 30. Mission Demolition

What You Will Learn

The Mission Demolition Prototype

Getting Started: Mission Demolition

Game Prototype Concept

Art Assets

Coding the Prototype

From Prototype to First Playable

Summary

Chapter 31. Space shmup – Part 1

What You Will Learn

Getting Started: Space SHMUP

Setting the Scene

Making the Hero Ship

Adding Some Enemies

Spawning Enemies at Random

Setting Tags, Layers, and Physics

Making the Enemies Damage the Player

Restarting the Game

Shooting (Finally)

Summary

Chapter 32. Space shmup – Part 2

What You Will Learn

Getting Started: Space SHMUP – Part 2

Enemy to Enemy_0

Programming Other Enemies

Shooting Revisited

Showing Enemy Damage

Adding Power-Ups and Boosting Weapons

Race Conditions & Script Execution Order

Making Enemies Drop PowerUps

Enemy_4 — A More Complex Enemy

Tuning Settings for the Game Entities

Adding a Scrolling Starfield Background

Summary

Chapter 33. Prospector Solitaire – Part 1

What You Will Learn

The Prospector Game

Getting Started: Prospector Solitaire

Build Settings

Setting Up the Unity Window Layout

Setting Up the Camera and Game Pane

Importing Images as Sprites

Constructing Cards from Sprites

Implementing Prospector in Code

Implementing Game Logic

Summary

Chapter 34. Prospector Solitaire – Part 2

What You Will Learn

Getting Started: Prospector – Part 2

Additional Prospector Game Elements

Adding GUI Elements to Display the Score

Building and Running Your WebGL Build

Summary

Chapter 35. Dungeon Delver – Part 1

What You Will Learn

The Dungeon Delver Game

Getting Started: Dungeon Delver — Part 1

Setting Up the Cameras

Understanding the Dungeon Data

Showing the Map with a Unity Tilemap

Adding the Hero

Giving Dray an Attack Animation

Dray’s Sword

Programmatic Collision in Unity Tilemap

The InRoom Script

Enemy: Skeletos

Keeping GameObjects in the Room

Aligning to the Grid

Moving from Room to Room

Making the Camera Follow Dray

Summary

Chapter 36. Dungeon Delver – Part 2

What You Will Learn

Getting Started: Dungeon Delver — Part 2

Dungeon Delver — Part 2 Overview

Implementing TileSwaps

Swapping in LockedDoor GameObjects

Implementing Keys and Unlocking Doors

Adding GUI to Track Key Count and Health

Enabling Enemies to Damage Dray

Making Dray’s Attack Damage Enemies

Modifying Enemy to Take Damage

Picking Up Items

Enemies Dropping Items on Death

Implementing a New Dungeon—The Hat

Implementing a Grappler

Summary

Part IV. Next Steps (Online only)

Chapter 37. Coding Challenges

Chapter 38. Beyond This Book

Part V. Appendices

Appendix A. Standard Project Setup Procedure

Appendix B. Useful Concepts

Appendix C. Online Reference

Appendix D. Tips for Teaching from This Book

Foreword

This content is currently in development.

Preface

This content is currently in development.

Part I. Game Design and Paper

Prototyping

Chapter 1. Thinking Like a Designer

Our journey starts here. This chapter presents the basic theories

of design upon which the rest of the book is built. In this chapter,

you also encounter your first game design exercise and learn more

about the underlying philosophy of this book.

You Are a Game Designer

As of this moment, you are a game designer, and I want you to say it out

loud:1

1 I thank my former professor Jesse Schell for asking me to make this statement publicly in a class

full of people. He also includes this request in his excellent book, The Art of Game Design: A Book

of Lenses (Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2008).

“I am a game designer.”

It’s okay. You can say it out loud, even if other people can hear you. In fact,

according to psychologist Robert Cialdini’s book, Influence: The

Psychology of Persuasion,2 if other people hear you commit to something,

you’re more likely to follow through. So, go ahead and tell your friends, tell

your family, shout it from the mountain tops, post it to social media:

2 Robert B. Cialdini. Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. (New York: Morrow, 1993).

“I am a game designer!”

But, what does it mean to be a game designer? This book will help you

answer that question and will give you the tools to start making your own

games. Let’s start with a design exercise.

Bartok: A Game Exercise

I first saw this exercise used by game designer Malcolm Ryan as part of a

Game Design Workshop session at the Foundations of Digital Gaming

conference. The goal of this exercise is to demonstrate how even a simple

change to the rules of a game can have a massivdde effect on the experience

of playing the game.

Bartok is a simple game played with a single deck of standard cards that is

very similar to the commercial game Uno. In the best-case scenario, you

would play this game with three friends who are also interested in game

design; however, I’ve also made a digital version of the game that you can

play solo. Either the paper or digital version will work fine for our

purposes.3

3 The card images in this book and in the digital car games presented in the book are based on

http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/lesser.html; https://sourceforge.net/projects/vector-cards/.

Objective

Be the first player to get rid of all the cards in your hand.

Getting Started

Here are the basic rules for Bartok:

To play the digital version of Bartok, simply visit the website for

this book:

http://book.prototools.net

You will find the game in the section of the website for Chapter 1.

You can, of course, also just grab a standard deck of playing cards

and a few friends and play the game in pedrson, which will allow

you to talk with your friends about the feel of the game and the

changes you want to make to it.

Playing the Digital Version of Bartok

1. Start with a regular deck of playing cards. Remove the Jokers,

leaving you with 52 cards (13 of each suit ranked Ace–King).

2. Shuffle the deck and deal seven cards to each player.

3. Place the rest of the cards face-down in a draw pile.

4. Pick the top card from the draw pile and place it on the table face-

up to start the discard pile.

5. Starting with the player to the left of the dealer and proceeding

clockwise, each player must play a card onto the discard pile if

possible, and if they cannot play a card, the player must draw a single

card from the draw pile (see Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1 The initial layout of Bartok. In the situation shown, the player

can chddose to play any one of the cards highlighted with blue borders

(7C, JC, 2H, 2S).

6. A player may play a card onto the discard pile if the card is either:

a. The same suit as the top card of the discard pile. (For example, if

the top card of the discard pile is a 2 of Clubs (2C), any other Club

may be played onto the discard pile.)

b. The same rank as the top card of the discard pile. (For example,

if the top card of the discard pile is a 2C, any other 2 may be played

onto the discard pile.)

7. The first player to successfully get rid of all their cards wins.

Playtesting

Try playing the game a couple of times to get a feel for it. Be sure to shuffle

the cards thoroughly between each playthrough. Games will often result in

a somewhat sorted discard pile, and without a good shuffle, subsequent

games may have results weighted by the nonrandom post-game card

distribution.

Tip

DEBLOCKING Deblocking is the term for strategies used to

break up blocks of cards (that is, groups of similar cards). In

Bartok, each successful game ends with all the cards sorted into

blocks of the same suit and blocks of the same rank. If you

don’t deblock those groups, the subsequent game will end

much faster because players are more likely to be dealt cards

that match each other.

According to mathematician and magician Persi Diaconis,

seven good riffle4 shuffles should be sufficient for nearly all

games;5 if you run into issues, though, some of these de-

blocking strategies can help.

4 A riffle shuffle is one where half of the deck starts in each hand and you bend the cards

up with the thumb and hold the cards down with the index finger of each hand, causing

the cards from the left and right to alternate falling into a center pile. See more at

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shuffling#Riffle.

5 Persi Diaconis, “Mathematical Developments from the Analysis of Riffle Shuffling,”

Groups, Combinatorics and Geometry, edited by Ivanov, Liebeck, and Saxl. World

Scientific (2003): 73–97. Also available online at

http://statweb.stanford.edu/~cgates/PERSI/papers/Riffle.pdf.

Here are some standard strategies for deblocking a deck of

cards if standard shuffling doesn’t work:

Deal the cards into several different piles. Then shuffle these

piles together.

Analysis: Asking the Right Questions

After each playtest, it’s important to ask the right questions. Of course, each

game will require slightly different questions, though many of them will be

based on these general guidelines:

Is the game of the appropriate difficulty for the intended

audience? Is it too difficult, too easy, or just right?

Is the outcome of the game based more on strategy or chance?

Does randomness play too strong a role in the game, or, alternatively,

is the game too deterministic so that after one player takes the lead,

the other players don’t have any chance to catch up?

Does the game have meaningful, interesting decisions? When it’s

your turn, do you have several choices, and is the decision between

those choices an interesting one?

Is the game interesting when it’s not your turn? Do you have

any effect on the other players’ turns, or do their turns have any

immediate effect on you?

We could ask many other questions, but these are some of the most

common.

Take a moment to think about your answers to these questions relative to

the games of Bartok you just played and write them down. If you’re playing

the paper version of this game with other human players, asking them to

write down their own answers to the questions individually and then

Deal the cards out face-down into a large, spread-out pool.

Then use both hands to move the cards around almost like

mixing water. This is how dominoes are usually shuffled, and

it can help break up your card blocks. Then gather all the cards

into a single stack.

Play 52 Pickup: Throw all the cards on the floor and pick

them up.

discussing them after they’re written is worthwhile, because it keeps each

player’s responses from being influenced by the other players.

Modifying the Rules

As you’ll see throughout this book, from a process standpoint, game design

is pretty straightforward. The process is almost always:

1. Incrementally modify the rules, changing very few things between

each playtest.

2. Playtest the game with the new rules.

3. Analyze how the feel of the game is altered by the new rules.

4. Design new rules that you think might move the feel of the game in

the direction you want.

5. Repeat this process until you’re happy with the game.

Iterative design is the term for this repetitive process of deciding on a small

change to the game design, implementing that change, playtesting the game,

analyzing how the change affected the gameplay, and then starting the

process over again by deciding on another small change. Chapter 7, “Acting

Like a Designer,” covers iterative design in detail.

For the Bartok example, why don’t you start by picking one of the

following three rule changes and playtesting it:

Rule 1: If a player plays a 2, the person to her left must draw two

cards instead of playing.

Rule 2: If any player has a card that matches the rank and color

(red or black) of the top card, they may announce “Match card!” and

play it out of turn. Play then continues with the player to the left of

the one who just played the out-of-turn card. This can lead to players

having their turns skipped.

For example: In a four-player game, the first player plays a 3C (three

of Clubs). The third player has the 3S (which matches both the rank

and color of the 3C), so they call “Match card!” and play the 3S on

top of the 3C out-of-turn, skipping the second player’s turn. Play then

continues with the fourth player.

Rule 3: A player must announce “Last card” when they have only

one card left. If someone else calls it first, the player must draw two

cards (bringing their total number of cards to three).

Choose only one of the rule changes from the previous listing and play the

game a couple times with the new rule. Then have each player write their

answers to the four playtest questions. You should also try playing with

another one of the rules (although I would recommend still only using one

of them at a time when trying a new rule for the first time).

If you’re playing the digital version of the game, you can use the check

boxes on the menu screen to choose various game options.

Analysis: Comparing the Rounds

Now that you’ve played through the game with some different rule options,

analyze the results from the different rounds. Look back over your notes

and see how each different rule set felt to play. As you experienced, even a

simple rule change can greatly change the feel of the game. Here are some

common reactions to the previously listed rules:

The original rules

Warning

WATCH OUT FOR PLAYTESTING FLUKES A weird

shuffle or other external factor can sometimes cause a single

play through the game to feel really different from the others.

This is known as a fluke, and you want to be careful not to

make game design decisions based on flukes. If something you

do seems to affect the game feel in a very unexpected way, be

sure to play through the game multiple times with that rule

change to make sure you’re not experiencing a fluke.

Many players find the original version of the game to be pretty

boring. There are no interesting choices to make, and as the players

remove cards from their hands, the number of possible choices

dwindles as well, often leaving the player with only one valid choice

for most of the later turns of the game. The game is largely based on

chance, and players have no real reason to pay attention to other

players’ turns because they don’t really have any way of affecting

each other.

Rule 1: If a player plays a 2, the person to her left must draw two

cards instead of playing.

This rule allows players to directly affect each other, which generally

increases interest in the game. However, whether a player has 2s is

based entirely on luck, and each player only really has the ability to

affect the player on their left, which often seems unfair. However,

this does make other players’ turns a bit more interesting because

other players (or at least the player to your right) have the ability to

affect you.

Rule 2: If any player has a card that matches the number and color

(red or black) of the top card, they may announce “Match card!” and

play it out of turn. Play then continues with the player to the left of

the one who just played the out-of-turn card.

This rule often has the greatest effect on player attention. Because

any player has the opportunity to interrupt another player’s turn, all

players tend to pay a lot more attention to each other’s turns. Games

played with this rule often feel more dramatic and exciting than those

played with the other rules.

Rule 3: A player must announce “Last card!” when they have only

one card left. If someone else calls it first, the player must draw two

cards.

This rule only comes into play near the end of the game, so it doesn’t

have any effect on the majority of gameplay, however, it does change

how players behave at the end. This can lead to some interesting

tension as players try to jump in and say, “last card” before the player

who is down to only one card. This is a common rule in both domino

and card games where the players are trying to empty everything

from their hands because it gives other players a chance to catch up

to the lead player if the leader forgets about the rule.

Designing for the Game Feel That You Want

Now that you’ve seen the effects of a few different rules on Bartok, it’s time

to do your job as a designer and make the game better. First, decide on the

feel that you want the game to have: Do you want it to be exciting and

cutthroat, do you want it to be leisurely and slow, or do you want it to be

based more on strategy than chance?

After you have a general idea of how you want the game to feel, think about

the rules that we tried out and try to come up with additional rules that can

push the feel of the game in the direction that you want. Here are some tips

to keep in mind as you design new rules for the game:

Change only one thing in between each playtest. If you change (or

even tweak) a number of rules between each play through the game,

it can be difficult to determine which rule is affecting the game in

what way. Keep your changes incremental, and you’ll be better able

to understand the effect that each is having.

The bigger change you make, the more playtests will be required to

understand how it changes the game feel. If you only make a subtle

change to the game, one or two plays can tell you a lot about how

that change affects the feel. However, if it’s a major rule change, you

will need to test it more times to avoid being tricked by a fluke game.

Additionally, if the small rule change only happens in rare

circumstances, you also may need multiple plays through the game to

experience that circumstance.

Change a number, and you change the experience. Even a

seemingly small change can have a huge effect on gameplay. For

instance, think about how much faster this game would be if there

were two discard piles to choose from or if the players started with

five cards instead of seven.

Of course, adding new rules is a lot easier to do when playing the card

game in person with friends than when working with a digital prototype.

That’s one of the reasons that paper prototypes can be so important, even

when you’re designing digital games. The first part of this book discusses

both paper and digital design, but most of the design exercises are done

with paper games because they can be so much faster to develop and test

than digital games.

The Definition of Game

Before moving too much further into design and iteration, we should

probably clarify what we’re talking about when we use terms such as game

and game design. Many very smart people have tried to accurately define

the word game. Here are a few of them in chronological order:

In his 1978 book The Grasshopper, Bernard Suits (who was a

professor of philosophy at the University of Waterloo) declares that

“a game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary

obstacles.”6

6 Bernard Suits, The Grasshopper (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1978), 56.

Game design legend Sid Meier says that “a game is a series of

interesting choices.”7

7 Andrew Rollings and Dave Morris. Game Architecture and Design (Scottsdale: Coriolis, 2000),

38.

In Game Design Workshop, Tracy Fullerton defines a game as “a

closed, formal system that engages players in a structured conflict

and resolves its uncertainty in an unequal outcome.”8

8 Tracy Fullerton, Christopher Swain, and Steven Hoffman. Game Design Workshop: A Playcentric

Approach to Creating Innovative Games, 2nd ed. (Boca Raton, FL: Elsevier Morgan Kaufmann,

2008), 43.

In The Art of Game Design, Jesse Schell playfully examines several

definitions for game and eventually decides on “a game is a problem-

solving activity, approached with a playful attitude.”9

9 Jesse Schell, Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses (Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2008), 37.

In the book Game Design Theory, Keith Burgun presents a much

more limited definition of game: “a system of rules in which agents

compete by making ambiguous, endogenously meaningful

decisions.”10, 11

10 Keith Burgun. Game Design Theory: A New Philosophy for Understanding Games (Boca Raton,

FL: A K Peters/CRC Press, 2013), 10, 19.

11 Endogenous means inherent to or arising from the internal systems of a thing, so “endogenously

meaningful decisions” are those decisions that actually affect the game state and change the

outcome. Choosing the color of your avatar’s clothing in Farmville is not endogenously

meaningful, whereas choosing the color of your clothing in Metal Gear Solid 4 is, because the color

of your clothing affects whether your avatar is visible to enemies.

As you can see, all of these are compelling and correct in their own way.

Perhaps even more important than the individual definition is the insight

that it gives us into each author’s intent when crafting that definition.

Bernard Suits’ Definition

In addition to the short definition “a game is the voluntary attempt to

overcome unnecessary obstacles,” Suits also offers a longer, more robust

version:

To play a game is to attempt to achieve a specific state of affairs, using

only means permitted by rules, where the rules prohibit use of more

efficient in favor of less efficient means, and where the rules are

accepted just because they make possible such activity.

Throughout his book, Suits proposes and refutes various attacks on this

definition; and having read the book, I am certainly willing to say that he

has found the definition of “game” that most accurately matches the way

that the word is used in day-to-day life.

However, it’s also important to realize that this definition was crafted in

1978, and even though digital games and roleplaying games existed at this

time, Suits was either unaware of them or intentionally ignored them. In

fact, in Chapter 9 of The Grasshopper, Suits laments that there is no kind of

game with rules for dramatic play through which players could burn off

dramatic energy (much like children can burn off excess athletic energy via

play of any number of different sports), exactly the kind of play that was

enabled by games like Dungeons & Dragons.12

12 Suits, Grasshopper, 95.

Although this is a small point, it gets at exactly what is missing from this

definition: Whereas Suits’ definition of game is an accurate definition of the

word, it offers nothing to designers seeking to craft good games for others.

For an example of what I mean, take a moment to play Jason Rohrer’s

fantastic game Passage13 (see Figure 1.2). The game only takes 5 minutes

to play, and it does a fantastic job of demonstrating the power that even

short games can have. Try playing through it a couple times. If you can’t

find a playable version for your computer, try watching some videos online,

though playing it yourself is certainly better.

13 Passage is downloadable from Rohrer’s website at http://hcsoftware.sourceforge.net/passage/, or

you can find an online version at http://passage.toolness.org/.

Figure 1.2 Passage by Jason Rohrer (released December 13, 2007)

Suits’ definition will tell you that, yes, this is a game. In fact, it is

specifically an “open game,” which he defines as: a game that has as its sole

goal the continuance of the game.14 In Passage, the goal is to continue to

play for as long as possible…or is it? Passage has several potential goals,

and it’s up to the player to choose which of these they want to achieve.

These goals could include the following:

14 Suits contrasts these with closed games, which have a specific goal (for example, crossing a

finish line in a race or ridding yourself of all your cards in Bartok). Suits’ example of an open game

is the games of make-believe that children play.

Moving as far to the right as possible before dying (exploration)

Earning as many points as possible by finding treasure chests

(achievement)

Finding a wife (socialization)

The point of Passage as an artistic statement is that each of these can be a

goal in life, and to some extent, these goals are all mutually exclusive. If

you find a wife early in the game, getting treasure chests becomes more

difficult because the two of you are unable to enter areas that could be

entered singly. If you choose to seek treasure, you will spend your time

exploring the vertical space of the world and won’t be able to see the

different scenery to the right. If you choose to move as far to the right as

possible, you won’t rack up nearly as much treasure.

In this incredibly simple game, Rohrer exposes a few of the fundamental

decisions that every one of us must make in life and demonstrates how even

early decisions can have a major effect on the rest of our lives. The

important thing here is that he is giving players choice and demonstrating to

them that their choices matter.

This is an example of the first of a number of designer’s goals that I will

introduce in this book: experiential understanding. Whereas a linear story

like a book can encourage empathy with a character by exposing the reader

to the character’s life and the decisions that they have made, games can

allow players to understand not only the outcome of decisions but also to be

complicit in that outcome by giving the player the power and the

responsibility of decision and then showing them the outcome wrought by

their decisions. Chapter 8, “Design Goals,” explores these in much greater

depth.

Sid Meier’s Definition

By stating that “a game is a series of interesting choices,” Meier is saying

very little about the definition of the word game (there are many, many

things that could be categorized as a series of interesting choices and yet are

not games) and quite a bit about what he personally believes makes for a

good game. As the designer of games such as Pirates, Civilization, Alpha

Centauri, and many more, Sid Meier is one of the most successful game

designers alive, and he has consistently produced games that present players

with interesting choices. This, of course, raises the question of what makes

a choice or decision interesting. An interesting decision is generally one

where:

The player has multiple valid options from which to choose.

Each option has both positive and negative potential consequences.

The outcome of each option is predictable but not guaranteed.

This brings up the second of our designer’s goals: to create interesting

decisions. If a player is presented with a number of choices, but one choice

is obviously superior to the others, the experience of deciding which to

choose doesn’t actually exist. If a game is designed well, players will often

have multiple choices from which to choose, and the decision will often be

a tricky one.

Tracy Fullerton’s Definition

As she states in her book, Tracy Fullerton is much more concerned with

giving designers tools to make better games than she is with the

philosophical definition of game. Accordingly, her definition of a game as

“a closed, formal system that engages players in a structured conflict and

resolves its uncertainty in an unequal outcome” is not only a good

definition of game but also a list of elements that designers can modify in

their games:

Formal elements: The elements that differentiate a game from

other types of media: rules, procedures, players, resources,

objectives, boundaries, conflict, and outcome.

(Dynamic) systems: Methods of interaction that evolve as the

game is played.

Conflict structure: The ways in which players interact with each

other.

Uncertainty: The interaction between randomness, determinism,

and player strategy.

Unequal outcome: How does the game end? Do players win, lose,

or something else?

Another critical element in Fullerton’s book is her continual insistence on

actually making games. The only way to become a better game designer is

to make games. Some of the games you’ll design will probably be pretty

awful—some of mine certainly have been—but even designing a terrible

game is a learning process, and every game you create will improve your

design skills and help you better understand how to make great games.

Jesse Schell’s Definition

Schell defines a game as “a problem-solving activity, approached with a

playful attitude.” This is similar in many ways to Suits’ definition,

including its consideration of the player’s perspective. According to both, it

is the playful attitude of the player that makes something a game.

Suits argues in his book that two people could both be involved in the same

activity, and to one, it would be a game, whereas to the other, it would not

be. His example is a foot race where one runner is just running because she

wants to take part in the race, but the other runner knows that at the finish

line there is a bomb they must defuse before it explodes. According to

Suits, although the two runners would both be running in the same foot

race, the one who is simply racing would follow the rules of the race

because of what Suits calls her lusory attitude. On the other hand, the

bomb-defusing runner would break the rules of the game the first chance

they got because they have a serious attitude (as is required to defuse a

bomb) and are not engaged in the game. Ludus is the Latin word for play, so

Suits proposes the term lusory attitude to describe the attitude of one who

willingly takes part in playing a game.

It is because of their lusory attitude that players will happily follow the

rules of a game even though there may be an easier way to achieve the

stated goal of the game (what Suits would call the pre-lusory goal). For

example, the pre-lusory goal of golf is to get the golf ball into the cup, but

there are many easier ways to do so than to stand hundreds of yards away

and hit the ball with a bent stick. When people have a lusory attitude, they

set challenges for themselves just for the joy of overcoming them.

So, another design goal is to encourage a lusory attitude. You should design

your game to encourage players to enjoy the limitations placed on them by

the rules. Think about why each rule is there and how it changes the player

experience. If a game is balanced well and has the proper rules, players will

enjoy the limitations of the rules rather than feel exasperated by them.

Keith Burgun’s Definition

Burgun’s definition of a game as “a system of rules in which agents

compete by making ambiguous, endogenously meaningful decisions” is his

attempt to push the discourse on games forward from a rut that he feels it

has fallen into by narrowing the meaning of game down to something that

can be better examined and understood. The core of this definition is that

the player is making choices and that those choices are both ambiguous (the

player doesn’t know exactly what the outcome of the choice will be) and

endogenously meaningful (the choice is meaningful because it has a

noticeable effect upon the game system).

Burgun’s definition is intentionally limited and purposefully excludes

several of the things that many people think of as games (including foot

races and other competitions based on physical skill) as well as reflective

games like The Graveyard, by Tale of Tales, in which the player

experiences wandering through a graveyard as an old woman. Both of these

are excluded because the decisions in them lack ambiguity and endogenous

meaning.

Burgun chooses such a limited definition because he wants to get down to

the essence of games and what makes them unique. In doing so, he makes

several good points, including his statement that whether an experience is

fun has little to do with the question of whether it is a game. Even a terribly

boring game is still a game; it’s just a bad game.

In my discussions with other designers, I have found that a lot of contention

can exist around this question of what types of things should fall under the

term game. Games are a medium that has experienced a tremendous amount

of growth, expansion, and maturation over the last few decades, and the

explosion of independent game development this decade has only hastened

the pace. Today, more people than ever before—with disparate voices and

varied backgrounds—are contributing work to the field of games, and as a

result, the definition of the medium is expanding, which is understandably

bothersome to some people because this expanding definition can be seen

as blurring the lines of what is considered a game. Burgun’s response to this

is his concern that it is difficult to rigorously advance a medium if we lack a

good definition of what the medium is. I’ll come back to this topic in a little

while.

Why Care About the Definition of Game?

In his 1953 book Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein

proposed that the term game, as it is used colloquially, had come at that

time to refer to several very different things that shared some traits (which

he likened to a family resemblance) but couldn’t be encapsulated in a single

definition. In 1978, Bernard Suits attacked this idea by using his book, The

Grasshopper, to argue very stringently for the specific definition of game

that you read earlier in this chapter. However, as Chris Bateman points out

in his book Imaginary Games, though Wittgenstein used the word game as

his example, he was really trying to make a larger point: the point that

words are created to define things rather than things being created to meet

the definition of words.

In 1974 (between the publications of Philosophical Investigations and The

Grasshopper), the philosopher Mary Midgley published a paper titled, “The

Game Game,” in which she explored and refuted the “family resemblance”

claim by Wittgenstein not by arguing for a specific definition of game

herself but instead by exploring why the word game existed. In her paper,

she agrees with Wittgenstein that the word game came into being long after

games existed, but she makes the statement that words like game are not

defined by the things that they encompass but instead by the needs that they

meet. As she states:

Something can be accepted as a chair provided it is properly made for

sitting on, whether it consists of a plastic balloon, a large blob of foam,

or a basket slung from the ceiling. Provided you understand the need you

can see whether it has the right characteristics, and aptness for that need

is what chairs have in common.15

15 Mary Midgley. “The Game Game,” Philosophy 49, no. 189 (1974): 231–53.

In her paper, Midgley seeks to understand some of the needs that games

fulfill. She completely rejects the idea that games are closed systems by

both citing many examples of game outcomes that have effects beyond the

game and pointing out that games cannot be closed because humans have a

reason for entering into them. To her, that reason is paramount. The

following are just a few reasons for playing games:

Humans desire structured conflict: As Midgley points out, “The

Chess Player’s desire is not for general abstract intellectual activity,

curbed and frustrated by a particular set of rules. It is a desire for a

particular kind of intellectual activity, whose channel is the rules of

chess.” As Suits pointed out in his definition, the rules that limit

behavior are there precisely because the challenge of those

limitations is appealing to players.

Humans desire the experience of being someone else: We are all

acutely aware that we have but one life to live (or at least one at a

time), and play can allow us to experience another life. Just as a

game of Call of Duty allows a player to pretend to experience the life

of a soldier, so too does The Graveyard allow the player to pretend to

experience the life of an old woman, and playing the role of Hamlet

allows an actor to pretend to experience the life of a troubled Danish

prince.

Humans desire excitement: Much popular media is devoted to this

desire for excitement, be it action films, courtroom dramas, or

romance novels. The thing that makes games different in this regard

is that the player is actively taking part in the excitement rather than

vicariously absorbing it, as is the case for the majority of linear

media. As a player, you aren’t watching someone else be chased by

zombies, you’re being chased yourself.

Midgley found it critical to consider the needs that are fulfilled by games in

order to understand both their importance in society and the positive and

negative effects that games can have on the people who play them. Both

Suits and Midgley spoke about the potentially addictive qualities of games

in the 1970s, long before video games became ubiquitous and public

concern emerged about players becoming addicted. As game designers, it is

useful for us to understand these needs and respect their power.

The Nebulous Nature of Definitions

As Midgley pointed out, it is useful to think of the word game as being

defined by the need that it fills. However, she also stated that a chess player

doesn’t want to play just any kind of game; they specifically want to play

chess. Not only is it difficult to come up with an all-encompassing

definition for game, it’s also true that the same word will mean different

things to different people at different times. When I say that I’m going to

play a game, I usually mean a console or video game; when my wife says

the same thing, though, she usually means Scrabble or another word game.

When my parents say they want to play a game, it means something like

Alan R. Moon’s Ticket to Ride (a board game that is interesting but doesn’t

require players to be overly competitive with each other), and my in-laws

usually mean a game of cards or dominoes when they use the word. Even

within our family, the word has great breadth.

The meaning of the word game is also constantly evolving. When the first

computer games were created, no one could have possibly imagined the

multi-billion-dollar industry that we now have or the rise of the fantastic

indie renaissance that we’ve seen over the past decade. All that they knew

was that these things people were doing on computers were kind of like

tabletop war board games (I’m thinking of Space War here), and they were

called “computer games” to differentiate them from the pre-existing

meanings of game.

The evolution of digital games was a gradual process with each new genre

building in some way on the ones that had come before, and along the way,

the term game expanded further and further to encompass all of them.

Now, as the art form matures, many designers are entering the field from

various other disciplines and bringing with them their own concepts about

what can be created with the technologies and design methodologies that

have been developed to make digital games. (You may even be one of

them.) As these new artists and designers enter the space, some of them are

making things that are very different from what we think of as a

stereotypical game. That’s okay; in fact, I think it’s fantastic! And, this isn’t

just my opinion. IndieCade, the international festival of independent games,

seeks every year to find games that push the envelope of what is meant by

game. According to Festival Chair Celia Pearce and Festival Director Sam

Roberts, if an independent developer wants to call the interactive piece that

they have created a game, IndieCade will accept it as one.16

16 This was stated during the Festival Submission Workshop given by Celia Pearce and Sam

Roberts at IndieCade East 2014 and is paraphrased on the IndieCade submissions website at

https://www.indiecade.com/submissions-help-section/eligibility/#mean-by-game (accessed

6/14/2021).

Summary

After all these interwoven and sometimes contradictory definitions, you

may be wondering why this chapter has spent so much time exploring the

definition of the word game. I have to admit that in my day-to-day work as

an educator and game designer, I don’t spend a lot of time wrestling with

the definitions of words. As Shakespeare points out, were a rose to be

named something else, it would still smell as sweet, still have thorns, and

still be a thing of fragile beauty. However, I believe that an understanding of

these definitions can be critical to you as a designer in the following three

ways:

Definitions help you understand what people expect from your

games. This proves especially true if you’re working in a specific

genre or for a specific audience. Understanding how your audience

defines the term will help you to craft better games for them.

Definitions can lead you to understand not only the core of the

defined concept but also the periphery (i.e., games that fit the

definition perfectly [the core] and games that just barely fit the

definition (the periphery)). As you read through this chapter, you

encountered several different definitions by different people, and

each had both a core and a periphery. The places where these

peripheries don’t mesh can be hints at some of the interesting areas to

explore with a new game. For example, the area of disagreement

between Fullerton and Midgley about whether a game is a closed

system highlights the previously untracked ground that in the 2000s

grew into alternate reality games (ARGs), a genre centered on

perforating the closed magic circle of play.17

17 The first large-scale ARG was Majestic (Electronic Arts, 2001), a game that would phone

players in the middle of the night and send them faxes and emails. Smaller-scale ARGs include the

game Assassin, which is played on many college campuses, where players can “assassinate” each

other (usually with Nerf or water guns, or by snapping a photo) any time that they are outside of

classes. One of the fun aspects of these games is that they are always happening and can interfere

with normal life.

Definitions can help you speak eloquently with others in the field.

This chapter has more references and footnotes than any other in the

book because I want you to be able to explore the philosophical

understanding of games in ways that are beyond the scope of this one

book (especially since this book is really focused on the practicalities

of actually making digital games). Following these footnotes and

reading the source material can help improve the critical thinking that

you do about games.

The Core Lessons of This Book

This book will actually teach you how to design a lot more than just games.

In fact, it will teach you how to craft any kind of interactive experience. As

I define it:

An interactive experience is any experience created by a designer;

inscribed into rules, media, or technology; and decoded by people

through play.

That makes interactive experience a pretty expansive term. In fact, any time

that you attempt to craft an experience for people—whether you’re

designing a game, planning a surprise birthday party, or even planning a

wedding—you’re using the same tools that you will learn as a game

designer. The processes that you will learn in this book are more than just

the proper way to approach game design. They are a meaningful way to

approach any design problem, and the iterative process of design that is

introduced in Chapter 7, “Acting Like a Designer,” is the essential method

for improving the quality of any design.

No one bursts forth from the womb as a brilliant game designer. My friend

Chris Swain18 is fond of saying that “Game design is 1% inspiration and

99% iteration,” a play on the famous quote by Thomas Edison. He is

absolutely correct, and one of the great things about game design (unlike

the previously mentioned examples of the surprise party and the wedding)

is that you get the chance to iterate on your designs, to playtest the game,

make subtle tweaks, and play it again. With each prototype you make—and

with each iteration of your prototypes—your skills as a designer will

improve. Similarly, once you reach the parts of this book that teach digital

development, be sure to keep experimenting and iterating. The code

samples and tutorials are designed to show you how to make a playable

game prototype, but every tutorial in this book will end where your work as

a designer should begin. Each one of these prototypes could be built into a

larger, more robust, better balanced game, and I encourage you to do so.

18 Chris Swain co-wrote the first edition of Game Design Workshop with Tracy Fullerton and

taught the class of the same name at the University of Southern California for many years, which I

took over from him in 2009. He is now an entrepreneur and independent game designer.

Moving Forward

Now that you’ve experienced a bit of game design and explored various

definitions of game, it’s time to move on to a more in-depth exploration of a

few different analytical frameworks that game designers use to understand

games and game design. The next chapter explores various frameworks that

have been used over the past several years, and the chapter that follows

synthesizes those into the framework used throughout the remainder of this

book.

Chapter 2. Game Analysis

Frameworks

Ludology is the fancy name for the study of games and game

design. Over the past decade, ludologists have proposed various

analytical frameworks for games to help them understand and

discuss the structure and fundamental elements of games and the

impact of games on players and society.

This chapter presents a few of the most commonly used

frameworks that you should know as a designer. The next chapter

synthesizes ideas from these common frameworks into the Layered

Tetrad framework used throughout this book.

Common Frameworks for Ludology

The frameworks presented in this chapter include the following:

MDA: First presented by Robin Hunicke, Marc LeBlanc, and

Robert Zubek, MDA stands for Mechanics, Dynamics, and

Aesthetics. It is the framework that is most familiar to designers

working in the field and has important things to say about the

difference between how designers and players approach games.

Formal, Dramatic, and Dynamic elements: Presented by Tracy

Fullerton and Chris Swain in the book Game Design Workshop, the

FDD framework focuses on concrete analytical tools to help

designers make better games and push their ideas further. It owes a

lot to the history of film studies.

Elemental Tetrad: Presented by Jesse Schell in his book The Art of

Game Design, the Elemental Tetrad splits games into four core

elements: mechanics, aesthetics, story, and technology.

Each of these frameworks has benefits and drawbacks, and each has

contributed to the Layered Tetrad presented in the following chapter of this

book. They are covered here in the order that they were published.

MDA: Mechanics, Dynamics, and Aesthetics

First proposed at the Game Developers Conference in 2001 and formalized

in the 2004 paper “MDA: A Formal Approach to Game Design and Game

Research,”1 MDA is the most commonly referenced analytical framework

for ludology. The key elements of MDA are its definitions of mechanics,

dynamics, and aesthetics; its understanding of the different perspectives

from which the designer and player view a game; and its proposal that

designers should first approach a game through the lens of aesthetics and

then work back toward the dynamics and mechanics that will generate those

aesthetics.

1 Robin Hunicke, Marc LeBlanc, and Robert Zubek, “MDA: A Formal Approach to Game Design

and Game Research,” in Proceedings of the AAAI workshop on Challenges in Game AI Workshop

(San Jose, CA: AAAI Press, 2004), https://users.cs.northwestern.edu/~hunicke/MDA.pdf —

accessed July 22, 2021.

Definitions of Mechanics, Dynamics, and

Aesthetics

One of the things that can be confusing about the three frameworks

presented in this chapter is that they each reuse some of the same words,

and each framework defines them slightly differently. MDA defines these

terms as follows:2

2 Ibid. p. 2.

Mechanics: The particular components of the game at the level of

data representation and algorithms. Mechanics include things like the

rules of the game and how the player interactions are designed.

Dynamics: The runtime behavior of the mechanics acting on player

inputs and each other’s outputs over time. Dynamics include all of

the actual actions that take place during gameplay as a result of the

mechanics.

Aesthetics: The desirable emotional responses evoked in the player

when they interact with the game system. Aesthetics in MDA are all

about how the players feel during and after playing the game.

Within the field, this is a very singular definition of aesthetics. No other

framework defines aesthetics this way. Aesthetics usually refers to the

branch of philosophy having to do with notions of beauty, ugliness, etc.

And, more colloquially, a design aesthetic is the cohesive intent of a design.

Designer and Player Views of a Game

According to MDA, designers should consider games first in terms of the

aesthetics, the emotions that the designer wants players to feel while

playing the game. After a designer has decided on the aesthetics, they will

work backward to the kinds of dynamic play that would prompt those

feelings, and finally to the gameplay mechanics that will create those

dynamics. Players tend to view the game in the opposite way: first

experiencing the mechanics (often by reading the written rules for the

game), then experiencing the dynamics by playing the game, and finally

(hopefully) experiencing the aesthetics that were initially envisioned by the

designer (see Figure 2.1).

Figure 2.1 According to MDA, designers and players view a game from

different directions.3

3 Adapted from: Hunicke, LeBlanc, and Zubek, “MDA: A Formal Approach to Game Design and

Game Research,” 2.

Design from Aesthetics to Dynamics to Mechanics

Based on the difference in views between designers and players, MDA

proposes that designers should first approach a game by deciding on the

emotional response (aesthetics) that they want to engender in the player and

then work backward from that to create dynamics and mechanics that fit

this chosen aesthetic.

For example, children’s games are often designed to make each player feel

like they’re doing well and have a chance to win up until the very end. To

have this feeling, players must feel that the end of the game is not inevitable

and must be able to hope for good luck throughout the game. Keep this in

mind when looking at the layout of a Snakes and Ladders game.

Snakes and Ladders

Snakes and Ladders is a board game for children that originated in ancient

India where it was known as Moksha Patamu.4 The game requires no skill

and is based entirely on chance. Each turn, a player rolls one die and moves

their counter the number of spaces shown. Counters are not placed on the

board initially, so if a player rolls a 1 on their first turn, they land on the

first space of the board. The goal is to be the first player to reach the end of

the board (space 100). If a player lands on a space at the start of a green

arrow (a ladder), they can move to the space at the end of the arrow (for

example, a player landing on the 1 space can move their piece to the 38). If

a player lands on the start of a red arrow (a snake), they must move their

piece to the space at the end of the arrow (for example, a player landing on

space 87 must move their piece all the way down to 24).

4 Jack Botermans, The Book of Games: Strategy, Tactics, & History (New York / London: Sterling,

2008), 19.

In the board layout depicted in Figure 2.2, the positioning of the snakes and

ladders is very important. Here are just a few examples of how:

Figure 2.2 A layout for the classic game Snakes and Ladders

The ladder from space 1 to 38 turns a very bad first roll into an

excellent roll. If a player rolls a 1 on their first turn, the player can

move immediately to 38 and gain a strong lead.

The final row of the game contains three snakes (93 to 73, 95 to 75,

and 98 to 79). Including three of these on the final row increases the

chance that a player in the lead will be moved back and also add

more tension to the final row of the board (note that there is almost

no tension on the row from 81 to 90; no snakes or ladders begin on

this row.

The snake 87 to 24 and the ladder 28 to 84 form an interesting pair.

If a player lands on 28 and moves to 84, her opponents can hope that

she will subsequently land on 87 and be forced back to 24.

Contrastingly, if a player lands on 87 and moves to 24, she can then

hope to land on 28 and be moved back up to 84.

Each of these examples of snake and ladder placement are based on

building hope in players and helping them to believe that dramatic changes

in position are possible in the game. If the snakes and ladders were absent

from the board, a player who was significantly behind the others would

have little hope of catching up.

In this original version of the game, the desired aesthetic is for the players

to experience hope, reversal of fortune, and excitement in a game in which

the players never make any choices. The mechanic is the inclusion of the

snakes and the ladders, and the dynamic is the intersection of the two where

the act of the players encountering the mechanics leads to the aesthetic

feelings of hope and excitement.

Modifying Snakes and Ladders for More Strategic Play

Young-adult and adult players are often looking for more challenge in

games and want to feel that they have won a game not by chance but by

making strategic choices along the way. Given that we as designers want

the game to feel more strategic and intentional, we can modify the rules (an

element of the mechanics) without changing the board to achieve this

aesthetic change. One example of this would be to add the following rules:

1. Players each control two pieces instead of one.

2. On their turn, each player rolls two dice.

3. They may either use both dice for one piece or one die for each

piece.

4. They may alternatively sacrifice one die and use the other to move

one opponent’s piece backward the number of spaces shown on the

die.

5. If a player’s piece lands on the same space as any opponent’s piece,

the opponent’s piece is knocked down one row. (For example, a piece

knocked off of 48 would fall to 33, and a piece knocked off 33 would

fall to 28 and then take the ladder up to 84!)

6. If a player’s piece lands on the same space as their own other piece,

the other piece is knocked up one row. (For example, a piece knocked

off of 61 could be knocked up to 80 and then follow the ladder to

100!)

These changes allow for a lot more strategic decision-making on the part of

the players (a change to the dynamic play of the game). With rules 4 and 5

in particular, it is possible to directly hurt or help other players,5 which can

lead to players forming alliances or grudges. Rules 1 through 3 also allow

for more strategic decisions and make the game much less susceptible to

chance. With the choice of which die to use for either piece and the option

for a player to choose to not move their own pieces, a smart player will

never be forced to move their own piece onto a snake.

5 An example of how this could be used to help another player would be a situation in which

knocking another player’s piece down a row would move the piece to the beginning of a ladder.

This is but one of many demonstrations of how designers can modify

mechanics to change dynamic play and achieve aesthetic goals.

Formal, Dramatic, and Dynamic Elements

Where MDA seeks to help both designers and game critics better

understand and discuss games, the framework of formal, dynamic, and

dramatic elements6 was created by Tracy Fullerton and Chris Swain to help

students in their Game Design Workshop class at the University of Southern

California more effectively design games.

6 Tracy Fullerton, Christopher Swain, and Steven Hoffman. Game Design Workshop: A Playcentric

Approach to Creating Innovative Games, 2nd ed. (Boca Raton, FL: Elsevier Morgan Kaufmann,

2008).

This framework breaks games down into three types of elements:

Formal elements: The elements that make games different from

other forms of media or interaction and provide the structure of a

game. Formal elements include things such as rules, resources, and

boundaries.

Dramatic elements: The story and narrative of the game, including

the premise. Dramatic elements tie the game together, help players

understand the rules, and encourage the player to become

emotionally invested in the outcome of the game.

Dynamic elements: The game in motion. When players turn the

rules into actual gameplay, the game has moved into dynamic

elements. Dynamic elements include things such as strategy,

behavior, and relationships between game entities. It’s important to

note that this is related to the use of the term dynamics in MDA but is

broader because it includes more than just the runtime behavior of

the mechanics.

Formal Elements

Game Design Workshop proposes seven formal elements that differentiate

games from other forms of media:

Player interaction pattern: How do the players interact? Is the

game single-player, one-on-one, team versus team, multilateral

(multiple players versus each other, as is the case in most board

games), unilateral (one player versus all the other players like some

Mario Party minigames or the board game Scotland Yard),

cooperative play, or even multiple individual players each working

against the same system?

Objective: What are the players trying to achieve in the game?

When has someone won the game?

Rules: Rules limit the players’ actions by telling them what they

may and may not do in the game. Many rules are explicitly written

and included in the game, but others are implicitly understood by all

players. (For example, it’s implicitly understood that you can’t steal

money from the bank in Monopoly, even though no rule explicitly

says so.)

Procedures: The types of actions taken by the players in the game.

A rule in Snakes and Ladders tells you to roll the die and move the

number of spaces shown. The procedure dictated by that rule is the

actual action of rolling the die and moving the piece. Procedures are

often defined by the interaction of a number of rules. Some are also

outside of the rules; though it is not explicitly defined by the rules of

Poker, bluffing is an important procedure in the game.

Resources: Resources are elements that have value in the game.

These include things such as money, health, items, and property.

Boundaries: Where does the game end and reality begin? In his

book Homo Ludens, John Huizinga defines the magic circle as a

temporary world where the rules of the game apply rather than the

rules of the ordinary world. In a sport like football or ice hockey, the

magic circle is defined by the boundaries of the playing field; but in

an alternative reality game such as I Love Bees (the ARG for Halo 2),

the boundaries are far less clear.

Outcome: How did the game end? There are both final and

incremental outcomes in games. In a game of chess, the final

outcome is that one player will win, and the other will lose. In a pen-

and-paper roleplaying game like Dungeons & Dragons, there are

incremental outcomes when a player defeats an enemy or gains a

level, and even death is often not a final outcome because there are

ways to resurrect players.

According to Fullerton, another way to look at formal elements is that the

game ceases to exist when they are removed. If one removes the rules,

outcome, and so on from a game, it ceases to be a game.

Dramatic Elements

Dramatic elements help make the rules and resources more understandable

to players and can give players greater emotional investment in the game.

Fullerton presents three types of dramatic elements:

Premise: The basic story of the game world. In Monopoly, the

premise is that each of the players is a real-estate developer trying to

get a monopoly on corporate real estate in Atlantic City, New Jersey.

In Donkey Kong, the player is trying to single-handedly save his

girlfriend from a gorilla that has kidnapped her. The premise forms

the basis around which the rest of the game’s narrative is built.

Character: Characters are the individuals around whom the story

revolves, be it the nameless and largely undefined silent first-person

protagonist of games like Quake or a character like Nathan Drake,

from the Uncharted series of games, who is as deep and

multidimensional as the lead characters in most movies. Unlike

movies, where the goal of the director is to encourage the audience to

have empathy for the film’s protagonist, in games, the player actually

is the protagonist character, and designers must choose whether the

protagonist will act as an avatar for the player (conveying the

emotions, desires, and intentions of the player into the world of the

game and following the wishes of the player) or as a role that the

player must take on (so that instead the player acts out the wishes of

the game character). The latter is the most common of the two and is

much simpler for writers and developers to implement.

Story: The plot of the game. Story encompasses the actual

narrative that takes place through the course of the game. The

premise sets the stage on which the story takes place.

One of the central purposes of dramatic elements that is not specifically

covered in Fullerton’s three types is that of helping the player to better

understand the rules. In the board game Snakes and Ladders, the fact that

the green arrows in our diagram are called “ladders” in the game implies

that players are meant to move up them. In 1943, when Milton Bradley

began publishing the game in the United States, they changed the name to

Chutes and Ladders.7 Presumably, this helped American children to better

grasp the rules of the game because the chutes (which look like playground

slides in the 1943 game) were a more obvious path downward than the

original snakes, just as the ladders were an obvious path upward.

7 About.com entry on Chutes and Ladders versus Snakes and Ladders:

https://www.thesprucecrafts.com/chutes-and-ladders-snakes-and-ladders-411609 — accessed July

22, 2021.

In addition to this, many versions of the game have included images of a

child doing a good deed at the bottom of a ladder and an image of the child

being rewarded for doing so at the top of the ladder. Conversely, the top of

chutes depicted a child misbehaving, and the bottom of the chute showed

them being punished for doing so. In this way, the narrative embedded in

the board also sought to encourage the moral standards of 1940s America.

Dramatic elements cover both the ability of the embedded narrative to help

players remember rules (as in the case of the snakes being replaced by

chutes) and the ability of the game narrative to convey meaning to the

players that persists outside of the game (as was intended by the images of

good and bad deeds and their consequences).

Dynamic Elements

Dynamic elements are those that occur only when the game is being played.

There are a few central things to understand about dynamics in games:

Emergence: Collisions of seemingly simple rules can lead to

unpredictable outcomes. Even an incredibly simplistic game like

Snakes and Ladders can lead to unexpected dynamic experiences. If

one player of the game happened to exclusively land on ladders

throughout the game while another exclusively landed on snakes,

each would have a very different experience of the game. If you

consider the six additional rules proposed earlier in this chapter, you

can easily imagine that the range of gameplay experienced by players

would expand in size due to the new rules. (For example, now,

instead of fate being against player A, perhaps player B would

choose to attack A at every possible opportunity, leading to a very

negative play experience for A.) Simple rules lead to complex and

unpredictable behavior. One of a game designer’s most important

jobs is to attempt to understand the emergent implications of the rules

in a game.

Emergent narrative: In addition to the dynamic behavior of

mechanics covered in the MDA model, Fullerton’s model also

recognizes that narrative can also be dynamic, with a fantastic

breadth of narratives emerging from the gameplay itself. Games, by

their nature, put players in extra-normal situations, and as a result,

they can lead to interesting stories. This is one of the central appeals

of pen-and-paper roleplaying games like Dungeons & Dragons, in

which a single player acts as the Dungeon Master and crafts a

scenario for the other players to experience and characters for them

to interact with. This is different from the embedded narrative

covered by Fullerton’s dramatic elements and is one of the

entertainment possibilities that is unique to interactive experiences.

Playtesting is the only way to understand dynamics:

Experienced game designers can often make better predictions about

dynamic behavior and emergence than novice designers, but no one

understands exactly how the dynamics of a game will play out

without playtesting them. The six additional rules proposed for

Snakes and Ladders seem like they would increase strategic play, but

it is only through several rounds of playtests that one could determine

the real effect the rules changes would have on the game. Repeated

playtesting reveals information about the various dynamic behaviors

that a game could have and helps designers understand the range of

experiences that could be generated by their game.

The Elemental Tetrad

In The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses,8 Jesse Schell describes the

elemental tetrad, through which he presents his four basic elements of

games:

8 Jesse Schell, The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses (Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2008).

Mechanics: The rules for interaction between the player and the

game. Mechanics are the elements in the tetrad that differentiate

games from all noninteractive forms of media (such as film or

books). Mechanics contain things like rules, objectives, and the other

formal elements described by Fullerton. This is different from the

mechanics presented by MDA because Schell’s use of the term

differentiates between game mechanics and the underlying

technology that enables them.

Aesthetics: Aesthetics describe how the game is perceived by the

five senses: vision, sound, smell, taste, and touch. Aesthetics cover

everything from the soundtrack of the game to the character models,

packaging, and cover art. This is different from MDA’s use of the

word aesthetics because MDA used the word to refer to the

emotional response engendered by the game, while Schell uses the

word to refer to things that are crafted by the game developers like

actual game art and sound.

Technology: This element covers all the underlying technology

that makes the game work. While this most obviously refers to things

such as console hardware, computer software, rendering pipelines,

and such, it also covers technological elements in board games.

Technology in board games can include things like the type and

number of dice that are chosen, whether dice or a deck of cards are

used as a randomizer, and various stats and tables used to determine

the outcome of actions.

Story: Schell uses the term story to convey everything covered by

Fullerton’s dramatic elements, not just what she terms story. In

Schell’s definition, story encompasses all of the narrative elements in

your game, including both premise and characters as well.

Schell arranges these elements into the tetrad shown in Figure 2.3.

Figure 2.3 The elemental tetrad by Jesse Schell9

9 Adapted from: Schell, The Art of Game Design, 42.

The tetrad shows how the four elements all interrelate with each other. In

addition, Schell points out that the aesthetics of the game are always very

visible to the player (again, this is different from the aesthetic feelings

described in MDA), and the technology of the game is the least visible with

players generally having a better understanding of the game mechanics

(e.g., the way that snakes and ladders affect the position of the player) than

game technology (e.g., the probability distribution of a pair of six-sided

dice). Schell’s tetrad does not touch on dynamic play of the game and is

more about the static elements of the game as it comes in a box (in the case

of a board game) or on disk. Schell’s elemental tetrad is discussed and

expanded considerably in the next chapter as it forms the elemental aspect

of the Layered Tetrad.

Summary

Each of these frameworks for understanding games and interactive art is

approaching the understanding of games from a different perspective:

MDA seeks to demonstrate and concretize the idea that players and

designers approach games from different directions and proposes that

designers can be more effective by learning to see their games from

the perspective of their players.

Formal, dramatic, and dynamic elements breaks game design into

specific components that can each be considered and improved. It is

meant to be a designer’s toolkit and to enable designers to isolate and

examine all the parts of their games that could be improved. FDD

also asserts the importance of narrative in player experience.

The elemental tetrad is more of a game developer’s view on games.

It separates the basic elements of a game into the sections that are

generally assigned to various teams: game designers handle

mechanics, artists handle aesthetics, writers handle story, and

programmers handle technology.

In the following chapter, the Layered Tetrad is presented as a combination

of and expansion on the ideas presented in all of these frameworks. These

frameworks form the underlying concepts that led to the Layered Tetrad,

and I strongly recommend reading the original paper and books in which

they were presented.

Chapter 3. The Layered Tetrad

The previous chapter presented you with various analytical

frameworks for understanding games and game design. This chapter

presents the Layered Tetrad, a combination and extension of many of

the best aspects of those frameworks. Each layer of the Layered

Tetrad is further expanded in one of the following chapters.

The Layered Tetrad is a tool to help you understand and create the

various aspects of a game. It will help you to analyze games that you

love and will help you to look at your game holistically, leading to an

understanding of not only the game’s mechanics but also their

implications in terms of play, socialization, meaning, and culture.

The Layered Tetrad is an expansion and combination of the ideas expressed by

the three game analysis frameworks presented in the previous chapter. The

Layered Tetrad does not define what a game is. Rather, it is a tool to help you

understand all the different elements that need to be designed to create a game

and what happens to those elements both during play and beyond as the game

becomes part of culture.

The Layered Tetrad is composed of four elements—as was Schell’s elemental

tetrad—but those four elements are experienced through three layers. The first

two, inscribed and dynamic, are based on the division between Fullerton’s

formal and dynamic elements. In addition, a third cultural layer is added that

covers the game’s life and effects outside of play, providing a link between

game and culture that is critical to understand for us to be creators of

meaningful art and responsible game designers.

Each of the layers is described briefly in this chapter, and each layer has a

chapter devoted to it later in the book.

The Inscribed Layer

The inscribed layer of the tetrad (see Figure 3.1) is very similar to Schell’s

elemental tetrad. The definitions of the four elements in this layer are similar to

Schell’s, but they are limited to the aspects of the game that exist when the

game is not being played.

Figure 3.1

The inscribed layer of the Layered Tetrad

Adapted from: Jesse Schell, The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses (Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press,

2008), 42.

Mechanics: The inscribed systems that define how the player and the

game will interact. This includes the rules of the game and additional

formal elements, including some from Fullerton’s book: player

interaction patterns, objectives, resources, boundaries, etc.

Aesthetics: Inscribed aesthetics describe how the game looks, sounds,

smells, tastes, and feels. Aesthetics cover everything from the

soundtrack of the game to the character models, packaging, and cover

art. This definition differs from the use of the word aesthetics in the

MDA (Mechanics, Dynamics, Aesthetics) framework because the MDA

used the word to refer to the emotional response engendered by the

game, whereas Schell and I use the word to refer to game elements that

are sensed by the player like art and sound assets.

Technology: Just as with Schell’s technology element, the inscribed

technology element covers all the underlying technology that makes the

game work for both paper and electronic games. For digital games, the

technology element is primarily developed by programmers, but it is

vital for designers to understand this element because the technology

written by programmers forms the possibility space of decisions that can

be made by game designers. This understanding is also critical because a

seemingly simple design decision (for example, let’s move this level

from solid ground onto a rocking ship in a massive storm) can require

thousands of hours of development time to implement.

Narrative:

Schell uses the term story in his elemental tetrad, but I’ve

chosen to use the broader term narrative to encompass the premise and

characters in addition to the plot and to be more in line with Fullerton’s

use of these terms. The inscribed narrative includes all pre-scripted story

and pre-generated characters that are in the game.

The Dynamic Layer

As in Fullerton’s book Game Design Workshop and the MDA framework, the

dynamic layer (see Figure 3.2) emerges through gameplay.

Figure 3.2

The dynamic layer positioned relative to the inscribed layer

As shown in the figure, players take the static inscribed layer of the game and

from it construct the dynamic layer. Everything in the dynamic layer arises

through play, and the dynamic layer is composed of both elements in the

players’ direct control and the results of their interaction with the inscribed

elements. The dynamic layer is the realm of emergence, the phenomenon of

complex behavior arising from seemingly simple rules. The emergent behavior

of a game is often difficult to predict, but one of the great skills of game design

that you will build over time is the ability to do so, or at least make pretty good

guesses. The four dynamic elements are:

Mechanics: Whereas inscribed mechanics covered rules, objectives,

and so on, the dynamic mechanics cover how the players interact with

those inscribed elements. Dynamic mechanics include procedures,

strategies, emergent game behavior, and, eventually, the outcome of the

game.

Aesthetics:

Dynamic aesthetics cover the way that aesthetic elements

are generated for the player during play. This includes everything from

procedural art (digital game art or music generated on the fly by

computer code) to the physical strain that can result from having to mash

a button repeatedly over a long period of time (which you may have

heard referred to as “controller thumb” or “Nintendo thumb”

2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_thumb—accessed November 17, 2019.

Technology:

Dynamic technology describes the behavior of the

technological components of a game during play. This covers how a pair

of dice never actually seems to generate the smooth bell curve of results

predicted by mathematical probability. It also covers nearly everything

that is done by computer code in digital games. One specific example of

this could be the performance of the game’s artificial intelligence code

for enemies, but in its broadest sense, dynamic technology covers

absolutely everything that a digital game’s code does when the game is

running.

Narrative:

Dynamic narrative refers to stories that emerge

procedurally out of game systems. This can mean an individual player’s

path through a branching scripted narrative such as L.A. Noire, the

family story created by a play through The Sims, or the stories generated

by team play with other human players. In 2013, the Boston Red Sox

baseball team went from worst to first in a story that mirrored the city of

Boston’s recovery from the bombing at the 2013 Boston Marathon. That

kind of story—enabled by the rules of professional baseball—also fits

under dynamic narrative.

The Cultural Layer

The third and final layer of the Layered Tetrad is cultural, and it describes the

game beyond play (see Figure 3.3). The cultural layer covers both the impact

of broader culture upon the game and the impact of the game upon culture. The

community of players around the game moves it into the cultural layer; and in

the cultural layer, the players actually have more control and ownership over

the game than the designers. However, it is also through this layer, that our

societal responsibility as designers becomes clear.

Figure 3.3

The cultural layer exists at the collision of the game and society.

The delineations between the four elements are much blurrier in the cultural

layer, but it’s still worthwhile to approach this layer through the lens of the four

elements:

Mechanics: The simplest form of cultural mechanics is represented by

things like game mods (modifications to a game that are created by

players to affect the inscribed mechanics of the game). This also covers

things as complex as the impact that the emergent play of a game can

have on society. For instance, the much-maligned ability for the player

character in Grand Theft Auto 3 to hire a prostitute and then kill her to

get his money back was a result of emergent dynamic mechanics in the

game, but it had a massive impact on the perception of the game by the

general public (which is part of the cultural layer).

3 You can find a discussion of the history of controversy in Australia around this aspect of the Grand

Theft Auto series at https://unrealitymag.com/what-everyone-has-gotten-wrong-in-the-grand-theft-auto-

prostitute-controversy/ — accessed June 15, 2021.

Aesthetics: As with the mechanics, cultural aesthetics can cover things

like fan art, remixes of the music for the game, or other aesthetic fan

activities, such as cosplay (short for costume play, when fans of the

game dress in costume to resemble game characters). One key point here

is that authorized transmedia properties (i.e., a conversion of the game’s

intellectual property to another medium by the owners of that IP, such as

the movie versions of Tomb Raider, a Pokémon lunchbox, etc.) are not

part of the cultural layer. This is because the original owners of the

game’s intellectual property also control authorized transmedia

properties, whereas the community of the game’s players controls

cultural aesthetics.

4 Of course, there are always edge cases to these distinctions. For instance, the Tomb Raider movies are

absolutely a separate inscribed layer created by the owners of the Tomb Raider intellectual property. On

the other hand, the television show Defiance—which was released in tandem with a game of the same

name in 2013—was meant to provide a full transmedia experience and is therefore a bit less cut and dry.

However, even for Defiance, I would personally classify the game and show as two related yet separate

inscribed layers.

Technology:

Cultural technology covers both the use of game

technologies for non-game purposes (e.g., flocking algorithms for game

characters could also be used in robotics) and the ability of technology to

affect the game experience. Back in the days of the NES (Nintendo

Entertainment System), having an Advantage or Max controller gave the

player the ability to press turbo buttons (which was an automated

method of pressing the regular A or B controller buttons very rapidly).

This was a massive advantage in some games and had an effect on the

game experience. Cultural technology also covers the expansion of

possibilities of what game can mean by continually expanding the

possibility space of gaming and the technological aspects of mods made

by players to alter the inscribed elements of a game (an example of this

is the Auto Chess mod to DotA2, which was originally created by a

player and now is recognized as different game).

5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dota_Auto_Chess — accessed June 15, 2021.

Narrative:

Cultural narrative encompasses the narrative aspects of

fan-made transmedia properties created from the game (e.g., fan fiction,

the narratives of fan-made tribute movies, and the fan-made characters

and premises that are part of some game mods). It also covers the stories

told about the game in culture and society, including both the stories that

vilify games like Grand Theft Auto and the stories that extol the virtues

and artistic merit of games like Journey and Ico.

The Responsibility of the Designer

All designers are aware of their responsibility for the inscribed layer of a game.

It’s obvious that the developers of the game must include clear rules,

interesting art, and so on to enable and encourage the game to be played.

At the dynamic layer, designers can get a little muddier about their

responsibility. Some designers are surprised by the behavior that emerges out

of their games and want to pass responsibility for that behavior on to the

players. For example, in 2009, Valve decided to give hats to players of their

game Team Fortress 2 via an item drop system.6 The mechanic they chose was

to randomly reward hats to players who were logged in. Because the

distribution of hats was based exclusively on whether the player was logged in

to a game at the right time, servers sprouted up that invited players to camp in

them, not actually playing the game, just waiting for hat drops. Valve saw this

behavior and chose to punish the players for it by taking hats back from any

player that they suspected of having camped on a server rather than actually

playing the game.

6 https://wiki.teamfortress.com/wiki/Item_drop_system — accessed November 17, 2019.

One way of interpreting this behavior is to see the players as trying to cheat the

game. However, another is to realize that the players were just engaging in the

most efficient method for obtaining hats as defined by the rules for hat drops

that Valve had created. Because the system was designed to give players hats

any time they were online regardless of whether they were actually doing

anything, the players settled on the easiest path to get the hats. The players

might not have honored the intent of the designers of the hat drop system, but

they didn’t cheat the system itself. Their dynamic behavior was exactly what

was implied by the rules of the system that Valve set in place.

As you can see

from this example, the designer is also responsible for the experiences of

players at the dynamic layer through the implications of the systems they

design. In fact, one of the most important aspects of game design is the

anticipation and crafting of the dynamic player experience. Of course, doing so

is a very difficult task, but that’s part of what makes it interesting.

7 https://wiki.teamfortress.com/wiki/Idling — accessed November 17, 2019.

So, what is the designer’s responsibility at a cultural level? As a result of most

game designers rarely if ever considering the cultural layer, video games are

generally regarded in society as puerile and vulgar, selling violence and

misogyny to teenage boys. You and I know that this doesn’t have to be the case

and that it isn’t actually true of many or even most games, but this is sadly a

nearly ubiquitous perception among the general public. Games can teach,

games can empower, and games can heal. Games can promote pro-social

behavior and help players learn new skills. A ludic attitude and some quickly

devised rules can make even the most tedious tasks enjoyable. As a designer,

you are responsible for what your game says to society about gaming and for

the impact that it has on players. We have become so good at making games

compelling that some players are addicted to them to their detriment. Some

designers have even made games that attempted to scam children into spending

hundreds or thousands of dollars (eventually leading to a massive class-action

lawsuit in at least one case). This kind of behavior by designers damages the

reputation of games in society and prevents many people from considering

games worthy of either their time or of being regarded as art, and that’s truly

sad. As game designers, we have a responsibility to promote pro-social,

thoughtful behavior through our games and to respect our players and the time

that they dedicate to experiencing what we create.

Summary

As demonstrated in this chapter, it’s important to explicitly realize that the

three layers of the Layered Tetrad represent a transition of ownership from the

developers of the game to the players of the game. Everything in the inscribed

layer is owned, developed, and implemented by the game designers and

developers. The inscribed layer is completely within the developers’ control.

The dynamic layer is the point at which the game is actually experienced, so

game designers require that players take action and make decisions for the

games inscribed by the designers to actually be experienced. Through players’

decisions and their effect on game systems, players take some ownership of the

experience, yet that experience is still subject to the inscribed decisions of the

developers. Thus, the ownership over the dynamic layer is shared between the

developers and the players.

At the cultural layer, the game is no longer under the developers’ control. This

is why things such as game mods fit in the cultural layer; through a game mod,

a player is taking control of and changing inscribed aspects of the game. Of

course, most of the original inscribed game still remains, but because the

players (as mod developers) determine which inscribed elements they choose

to leave and which they choose to replace, the players are in control. This is

also why I have excluded authorized transmedia from the cultural layer. The

developers and owners of the inscribed game maintain ownership over the

authorized transmedia, and the cultural layer is defined by the shift of

ownership to the players and the communities that surround the game.

Additionally, the aspect of the cultural layer that covers the perception of the

game by non-players in society is also largely controlled by the player

community’s representation of their gameplay experience. People who don’t

play a game have their opinion of that game shaped by the media they read that

was (hopefully) written by people who did actually play the game. However,

even though the cultural layer is largely controlled by players, the developers

and designers of a game still have an important influence over and

responsibility for the game and its effect on society.

The next three chapters each cover one layer of the Layered Tetrad and reveal

it in more detail.

Chapter 4. The Inscribed Layer

This is the first of three chapters that explore the layers of the

Layered Tetrad in greater depth.

As you learned in Chapter 3, “The Layered Tetrad,” the inscribed

layer covers

all elements that are directly designed and encoded by

game developers

In this chapter, we look at the inscribed aspects of all four elements:

Mechanics, Aesthetics, Narrative, and Technology.

Inscribed Mechanics

The inscribed mechanics are most of what one would think of as the traditional

job of a game designer. In board games, this includes designing the board

layout, the rules, the various cards that might be used, and any tables that could

be consulted. Much of the inscribed mechanics are described very well by

Tracy Fullerton’s book Game Design Workshop in her chapter on formal

elements of games, and for the sake of lexical solidarity (and my distaste for

each new book on game design book choosing to use different vocabulary), I

reuse her terminology throughout this section of the chapter as much as the

Layered Tetrad framework allows.

In Chapter 2, “Game Analysis Frameworks,” I listed seven formal elements of

games that were presented in Tracy Fullerton’s book Game Design Workshop:

player interaction patterns, objectives, rules, procedures, resources, boundaries,

and outcomes. In the formal, dramatic, and dynamic elements framework, these

seven elements are defined as those that constitute the aspects that make games

different from other media.

Inscribed mechanics are a bit different from this—though there is a lot of

overlap—because mechanics is the element of the tetrad that is unique to

games. However, the core of the inscribed layer is that everything in it is

intentionally designed by a game developer, and the mechanics are no

exception. As a result of this, inscribed mechanics do not include procedures or

outcomes (which are included as part of Fullerton’s formal elements) because

both are controlled by the player and therefore part of the dynamic layer. We’ll

also add a couple of new elements to give us the following list of inscribed

mechanical elements:

Objectives:

Objectives cover the goals of the players in the game.

What are the players trying to accomplish?

Player relationships: Player relationships define the ways that players

combat and collaborate with each other and the game. How do the

players’ objectives intersect, and how do these intersections shape their

interactions?

Rules: Rules specify and limit player actions. What can and can’t the

players do to achieve their objective?

Boundaries:

Boundaries define the limits of the game and relate

directly to the magic circle. Where are the edges of the game? Where

does the magic circle exist?

Resources: Resources include assets or values that are relevant within

the boundaries of the game. What does the player own in-game that

enables their in-game actions?

Spaces:

Spaces define the shape of the game space and the

possibilities for interaction therein. This is most obvious in board games,

where the board itself is the space of the game.

Tables: Tables define the statistical shape of the game. How do players

level up as they grow in power? What moves are available to a player at

a given time?

All of these inscribed mechanical elements interact with each other, and

overlaps certainly exist between them (e.g., the tech tree in Civilization is a

table that is navigated like a space). The purpose in this book of dividing them

into these seven categories is to help you as a designer think about the various

possibilities for design in your game. Not all games have all elements, but as

with the “lenses” in Jesse Schell’s book The Art of Game Design: A Book of

Lenses, these inscribed mechanical elements are seven different ways to look at

the various things that you can design for a game.

Objectives

Although many games have an apparently simple objective—to win the game

—in truth, every player will be constantly weighing several objectives every

moment of your game. These can be categorized based on their immediacy and

their import to the player, and some objectives may be considered very

important to one player while being less important to another.

Immediacy of Objectives

As shown in the image in Figure 4.1 from the beautiful game Journey by

thatgamecompany, nearly every screen of a modern game presents the player

with short-, mid-, and long-term objectives.

Figure 4.1

Short-, mid-, and long-term objectives in the first level of

Journey with objectives highlighted in green, blue, and purple respectively

Short-term objectives: The player wants to charge their scarf (which

enables flying in Journey), so they’re singing (the white sphere

surrounding the player), which draws the highlighted scarf pieces to

them. They are also drawn to explore the nearby building.

Mid-term objectives: Three additional structures can be seen near the

horizon. Because the rest of the desert is largely barren, the player is

attracted to these ruins on the horizon (this indirect guidance strategy is

used several times throughout Journey and is analyzed in Chapter 12,

“Guiding the Player”).

Long-term objectives:

In the first few minutes of the game, the player

is shown the mountain with the shaft of light (shown in the top-left

corner of Figure 4.1), and their long-term objective throughout the game

is to reach the top of this mountain.

Importance of Objectives

Just as objectives vary in immediacy, they also vary in importance to the

player. An open-world game like Skyrim by Bethesda Game Studios has both

primary and optional objectives. Some players may choose to exclusively seek

the primary objectives and can play through Skyrim in as little as 10 to 20

hours, whereas others who wish to explore various side quests and optional

objectives can spend more than 400 hours in the game without exhausting the

content (and often without ever finishing the primary objectives). Optional

objectives are often tied to specific types of gameplay; Skyrim offers a whole

series of missions for players who want to join the Thieves Guild and

specialize in stealth and theft. There are also other series of missions for those

who choose to focus on archery or melee

combat. This ensures that the game

can adapt to the varying gameplay styles of different players.

1 This is a word that is often mispronounced by gamers. The word melee is pronounced “may-lay.” The

word mealy (pronounced “mee-lee”) means either pale or grain-like in some other way (e.g., cornmeal).

Conflicting Objectives

As a player, the objectives that you have will often conflict with each other or

compete for the same resources. In a game like Monopoly, the overall objective

of the game is to finish the game with the most money, but you must give up

money to purchase assets like property, houses, and hotels that have the

potential to eventually make more money later. Looking at the design goal of

presenting the player with interesting choices, a lot of the most interesting

choices that a player can make are those that will benefit one objective while

hurting another.

Approaching it from a more pragmatic perspective, each objective in the game

will take time to complete, and a player may only have a certain amount of

time that they are willing to devote to the game. Returning to the Skyrim

example, many people (myself included) never finished the main quest of

Skyrim because they spent all of their time playing the side quests and lost

track of the urgency of the main story. Presumably, the goal of Skyrim’s

designers was to allow each player to form their own story as they played

through the game—it’s possible that the designers wouldn’t care that I hadn’t

finished the main quest as long as I enjoyed playing the game—but as a player,

I felt that the game ended not with a bang but a whimper as the layers upon

layers of quests I was given had seemingly smaller and smaller returns. If, as a

designer, it’s important to you that your players complete the main quest of the

game, you need to make sure that the player is constantly reminded of the

urgency of the task and (unlike many open world games) you may need to have

consequences for the player if they do not complete the main quest in a timely

manner. As an example, in the classic game Star Control, if the player did not

save a certain alien species within a given amount of time from the start of the

game, the species’ planet actually disappeared from the universe.

Player Relationships

Just as an individual player has several objectives in mind at any given time,

the objectives that players have also determine relationships between them.

Player Interaction Patterns

In Game Design Workshop, Fullerton lists seven different player interaction

patterns, as shown in Figure 4.2:

Figure 4.2 The seven player interaction patterns listed in Game Design

Workshop

Player vs. Player:

Each of two players has the objective of defeating

the other.

Single Player:

The player has the objective of beating the game.

Team Competition: Two teams of players, each with the objective of

beating the other.

Unilateral Competition:

One player versus a team of other players.

This is found in the board game Scotland Yard (also called Mr. X), where

one player plays a criminal trying to evade the police, and the other 2 to

4 players of the game are police officers trying to collaborate to catch the

criminal.

Cooperative Play: Multiple players share the common objective of

working together to beat the game.

Multilateral Competition: Each of multiple players has the objective

of defeating all the others. This is the pattern of most board games with

more than two players.

Parallel Play:

Several co-located players each have the objective of

beating the game, but they have little or no interaction with each other.

This can often be seen in MMORPGs (massively multiplayer online

roleplaying games, also abbreviated MMOs) such as World of Warcraft

and some ARGs (augmented reality games) like Pokémon Go when

players are each seeking to succeed at their missions in the same game

world but not interacting with each other. Fullerton called this pattern

“multiple individual players versus game.”

Some games, such as BioWare’s Mass Effect, provide computer-controlled

allies for the player. In terms of player interaction patterns, these computer-

controlled allies can either be thought of as an element of the single player’s

abilities in the game or as proxies for other players that could play the game, so

designers could approach a single-player game with computer-controlled allies

either as Single Player or as Cooperative Play.

Objectives Define Player Relationships and Roles

In addition to the interaction patterns listed in the preceding section, there are

also various combinations of them, and in several games, one player might be

another player’s ally at one point and their competitor at another. For example,

when trading money for property in a game like Monopoly, two players make a

brief alliance with each other, even though the game is primarily multilateral

competition.

At any time, the combination of all the players’ layered objectives define the

relationships between players (as well as the relationship between each player

and the game). These relationships lead each player to play one of several

different roles:

Protagonist:

The player trying to conquer the game.

Competitor:

The player trying to conquer other players. This is

usually done solely to win the game, but in rare cases can be done on

behalf of the game (e.g., in the 2004 board game Betrayal at House on

the Hill, partway through the game, the rules force one of the players to

become evil, and they must then try to kill the other players).

Collaborator:

The player working to aid other players.

Citizen:

The player in the same world as other players but not really

collaborating or competing with them. One great real-life example of

this is Pokémon Go, where you might be in a park looking for Pokémon

at the same time as some other players. None of your in-game actions

affect other players, but you are all in the same physical space. Though it

doesn’t affect your game, you can choose to aid the other players in the

park, and this is a common way for people to meet each other, both in

Pokémon Go and in online MMOs.

Game Master:

Although this is not a role in most games, it is a critical

role in most tabletop roleplaying games. The game master is trying to

create a compelling experience for the other players, giving them

interesting narrative and a variety of challenges at different levels of

difficulty that require them to use various skills.

In many multiplayer games, all players will play each of these roles at different

times, which is sometimes enforced by the rules of the game, including

“betrayal” games such as Betrayal at House on the Hill. In other games,

including Among Us and Werewolf, the rules force one player to pretend to

collaborate with the other players while secretly working against them. As

you’ll see when we look into the dynamic layer, different types of players

prefer different roles (see the section “Player Intent: Bartle’s Types, Cheaters,

and Spoilsports” in Chapter 5).

Rules

Rules limit the players’ actions. Rules are also the most direct inscription of the

designer’s concept of how the game should be played. In the written rules of a

board game, designers are attempting to inscribe and encode the experience

that they want the players to have when playing the game. Later, the players

decode these rules and hopefully experience something like what the designer

intended.

Unlike paper games, digital games usually have very few inscribed rules that

are read directly by the player; however, the programming code written by

game developers is another way of encoding rules that will be decoded through

play. Because rules are the most direct method through which the game

designer shapes gameplay, rules act to define many of the other elements. For

example, the money in Monopoly only has value because the rules declare that

players can use it to buy assets and other resources.

Explicit written rules are the most obvious form of rules, but there are also

implicit rules. For example, in poker, there is an implicit rule that you should

not hide cards up your sleeve. This is not explicitly stated in the rules of poker,

but every player understands that doing so would be cheating.

This is a good example of one of the differences between single-player and multiplayer game design.

In a multiplayer poker game, concealing a card would be cheating and could ruin the game. However, in

the game Red Dead Redemption by Rockstar Studios, the in-game poker tournaments become much

more interesting and entertaining after the player acquires the suit of clothes that allows their character

to conceal and swap poker cards at will, while risking having their cheating discovered by NPCs (Non-

Player Characters).

Boundaries

Boundaries define the edges of the space and time in which the game takes

place. Within the boundaries, the rules and other aspects of the game apply.

Inside the magic circle of the game, poker chips are worth something,

slamming into other hockey players on the ice is okay, and it matters which car

crosses a line on the ground first in an auto race. Sometimes, boundaries are

physical, like the wall around a hockey rink. Other times, boundaries are less

obvious. When a player is playing an ARG (Alternate Reality Game

), the

game is often surrounding the player during their normal day. In one of the first

ARGs, Majestic (a 2001 game by Electronic Arts), after players of the game

gave EA their phone number, fax number, email address, and home address,

they would receive emails, physical mail, phone calls, and faxes at all times of

the day from characters in the game (including desperate phone calls from

game characters late at night). The intent of the game was to blur the

boundaries between gaming and everyday life.

Unfortunately, ARG is the industry standard acronym for both Augmented Reality Game (a game in

which players view an augmented version of real-life through a digital lens, e.g., Pokémon Go) and

Alternate Reality Game (a game in which the game breaks the magic circle and intrudes into the reality

of the player, as discussed in this section).

Resources

Resources are things of value in a game. These can be either assets (actual

items in the game) or non-material attributes (qualities that they player

character possesses). Assets in games include things such as the equipment that

Link has collected in a Legend of Zelda game; the resource cards that players

earn in the board game Settlers of Catan; and the houses, hotels, and property

deeds that players purchase in Monopoly. Attributes often include things such

as health, the amount of air left when swimming underwater, and experience

points. Because money is so versatile and is ubiquitous across so many games,

it is somewhere between the two. A game can have physical money assets (like

the cash in Monopoly), or it can have a nonphysical money attribute (like the

amount of money that a player has in Forza Horizon games).

Of course, the most important resource that you as a real person have is time.

At this moment, you’re spending your time reading this book, and through it,

building and expanding your knowledge. Several games now use your real time

as a resource, whether it’s the energy mechanics of many mobile games that

ask you to pay money to avoid having to wait in real-time for your energy to

renew, or the spoilage mechanics of games like Farmville that require you to

return to the game within a limited time window if you don’t want your crops

to spoil (and become worthless), or the many ad-supported games that ask you

to spend your time watching an ad (or often allow you to spend your money to

avoid it). Your time is your most valuable resource, and there are many ways

that others are attempting to monetize it. Make sure that you spend it well.

Spaces

Designers are often tasked with creating navigable spaces. This includes both

designing the board for a board game and designing virtual levels in a digital

game. In both cases, you want to think about both flow through the space and

making the areas of the space unique and interesting. Things to keep in mind

when designing spaces include the following:

The purpose of the space:

Architect Christopher Alexander spent

years researching why some spaces were particularly well suited to their

use and why others weren’t. He distilled this knowledge into the concept

of design patterns through his book A Pattern Language,

which

explored various patterns for good architectural spaces. The purpose of

that book was to put forward a series of patterns that others could use to

make a space that correctly matched the use for which it was intended.

For example, a Gothic cathedral is designed for several reasons: to guide

a person’s eye upward, to create a sense of awe, and to make them feel

part of something greater than themselves.

4Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, and Murray Silverstein, A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings,

Construction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977).

Flow:

Does your space allow the player to move through it easily, or if

it does restrict movement, is there a good reason? In the board game

Clue, players roll a single die each turn to determine how far they can

move. This can make it very slow to move about the game board. (The

board is 24x25 spaces, so with an average roll of 3.5, it could take 7

turns to cross the board.) Realizing this, the designers added secret

passages that allow players to teleport from each corner of the board to

the opposite corner, which helped flow through the mansion quite a bit.

Landmarks:

It is more difficult for players to create a mental map of

3D virtual spaces than actual spaces through which they have walked in

real life. Because of this, it is important that you have landmarks in your

virtual spaces that players can use to more easily orient themselves.

In Honolulu, Hawaii, people don’t give directions in terms of compass

directions (north, south, east, and west) because these are not easily

determined unless it’s sunrise or sunset. Instead, the people of Honolulu

navigate by obvious landmarks: mauka (the mountains to the northeast),

makai (the ocean to the southwest), Diamond Head (the landmark

mountain to the southeast), and Ewa (the area to the northwest). On

other parts of the Hawaiian Islands, mauka means inland and makai

means towards the ocean, regardless of compass direction (islands being

circular). Making landmarks that players can easily see will limit the

number of times your players need to consult the map to figure out

where they are.

Embedded experiences:

The game as a whole is an experience, but

the map or space of the game also needs to be sprinkled with interesting

experiences for your players. In Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag, the

world map is a vastly shrunken version of the Caribbean Sea. Even

though the actual Caribbean has many miles of empty ocean between

islands that would take a sailing vessel hours or days to cross, the

Caribbean of AC4 has events sprinkled throughout it that ensure that the

player will encounter a chance to have an experience several times each

minute. These could be small experiences like finding a single treasure

chest on a tiny atoll, or they could be large experiences such as coming

across a fleet of enemy ships. These experiences make the game world

feel vibrant and alive. By contrast, the game world of Shadow of the

Colossus is a vast open space with few interactions, leading to the

feelings of extreme loneliness engendered by that game.

Short-, mid-, and long-term objectives:

As demonstrated in the

screen shot from Journey shown in Figure 4.1, your space can have

multiple levels of goals. In open-world games, players are often shown a

high-level enemy early on so that they have something to aspire to defeat

later in the game. Many games also clearly mark areas of the map as

easy, medium, or high difficulty.

Tables

Tables are a critical part of game balance, particularly when designing modern

digital games. Put simply, tables are grids of data that are often synonymous

with spreadsheets, but tables can be used to design and illustrate many different

things:

Probability:

Tables can be used to determine probability in very

specific situations. In the board game Tales of the Arabian Nights, the

player selects the proper table for the individual creature they have

encountered, and it gives them a list of possible reactions that they can

have to that encounter and the various results of each of their possible

reactions.

Progression: In paper roleplaying games (RPGs) like Dungeons &

Dragons, tables show how a player’s abilities increase and change as

their player character’s level increases.

Playtest data:

In addition to tables that players use during the game,

you as a designer will also create tables to hold playtest data and

information about player experiences. You can find more information on

this in Chapter 10, “Game Testing.”

Of course, tables are also a form of technology in games, so they cross the line

between mechanics and technology. Tables as technology include the storage of

information and any transformation of information that can happen in the table

(e.g., formulae in spreadsheets). Tables as mechanics include the design

decisions that game designers make and inscribe into the table.

Inscribed Aesthetics

Inscribed aesthetics are the aesthetic elements that are crafted by the

developers of the game. These cover all five senses—vision, hearing, touch,

smell, and taste—and as a designer, you should be aware that throughout the

time your player is playing the game, they will be sensing with all five of their

senses.

The Five Aesthetic Senses

Designers must consider all five of the human senses when inscribing games.

These five senses are:

Vision:

Of the five senses, vision is the one that gets the greatest

attention from most game development teams. As a result, the fidelity of

the visual experience that we can deliver to players has seen more

obvious improvement over the past decades than that of any other sense.

When thinking about the visible elements of your game, be sure to think

beyond the 3D art in the game or the art of the board in a paper game.

Realize that everything that players (or potential players) see that has

anything to do with your game will affect their impression of it as well

as their enjoyment of it. Some game developers in the past have put

tremendous time into making their in-game art beautiful only to have the

game packaged in (and hidden behind) awful box art.

5If you want an example of this, search the internet for “Mega Man 1 box art”…you’ll regret it later.

Hearing:

Audio in games is second only to video in the amazing level

of fidelity that can be delivered to players. All modern consoles can

output 5.1-channel sound, and many can do even better than that. Game

audio is composed of sound effects, music, and dialogue. Each will take

a different amount of time to be interpreted by the player, and each has a

different best use. On a medium-to-large development team, a different

artist usually handles each of these three.

Another aspect of audio to consider is background noise. For mobile

games, you can almost always expect that the player is going to be in a

non-optimal audio situation when playing your game. Though audio can

always add to a game, it’s just not prudent to make it a vital aspect of a

mobile game unless it’s the core feature of the game (e.g., games like

Papa Sangre by Somethin’ Else or Freeq by Psychic Bunny). There is

also background noise in computer and console games to consider. Some

cooling fans can be loud enough to interfere with subtle game audio,

which needs to be considered when developing quiet audio for digital

games.

Touch:

Touch is very different between board games and digital

games, but in both cases, it’s the most direct contact that you have with

the player. In a board game, touch comes down to the feel of the playing

pieces, cards, board, and so on. Do the pieces for your game feel high

quality or do they feel cheap? Often you want them to be the former, but

the latter isn’t always terrible. James Ernst—possibly the most prolific

board game designer in the world for several years—ran a company

called Cheap Ass Games, the mission of which was to get great games to

players at as low a cost to them as possible. To cut costs, playing pieces

were made of cheap materials, but this was fine with players because the

games from his company cost less than $10 each instead of the $40–$50

that many board games cost. All design decisions are choices; just make

sure that you’re aware of the options and make the choice intentionally.

One of the most exciting recent technological advancements for board

game prototyping is 3D printing, and many board game designers are

starting to print pieces for their game prototypes. There are also several

companies online that specialize in printing custom game boards, cards,

and pieces, allowing you to easily create a playable copy of any board

game you design.

Digital games also include aspects of touch. The way that the controller

feels in a player’s hands and the amount of fatigue that it causes are

definitely aspects that a designer needs to consider. When the fantastic

PlayStation 2 game Okami was ported to the Nintendo Wii, the designers

chose to change the attack command from a button press (the X on the

PlayStation controller) to a waggle of the Wiimote (which mimicked the

attack gesture from The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, a game that

had done very well on the Wii). However, while attacks in the heat of

battle in Twilight Princess happen about once every couple of seconds,

attacks in Okami happen several times per second, so the attack gesture

that worked well in Twilight Princess instead caused considerable player

fatigue in Okami. With the rise of tablet and smartphone gaming, touch

and gesture are elements that every digital game designer must consider

carefully.

Another aspect of touch in digital games is rumble-style player

feedback. As a designer, you can choose the intensity and style of

rumble feedback in most modern console controllers.

Smell:

Smell is not often a designed aspect of inscribed aesthetics, but

it is there. Just as different book printing processes have different smells,

so too do different board and card game printing processes. Make sure

that you get a sample from your manufacturer before committing to

printing 1,000 copies of something that might smell strange.

Taste:

Taste factors into even fewer games than smell, yet there are

still some games where it is a factor, including drinking games and some

kissing games.

Aesthetic Goals

Humankind has been making art and music since long before the dawn of

written history. Therefore, when designing and developing the inscribed

aesthetic elements of a game, we as game developers are taking advantage of

hundreds of years of cultural understanding of other forms of art. Interactive

experiences have the advantages of being able to pull from all of that

experience and of allowing us as designers to incorporate all the techniques and

knowledge of aesthetic art into the games that we create. However, when we do

so, it must be done with a reason, and it must mesh cohesively with the other

elements of the game. These are some of the goals that aesthetic elements can

serve well in our games:

Mood:

Aesthetics do a fantastic job of helping to set the emotional

mood of a game. Although mood can definitely be conveyed through

game mechanics, both visual art and music can usually influence a

player’s mood much faster than mechanics are able to.

Information: Several informational colors are built into our psyche as

mammals. Things like the color red or alternating yellow and black are

seen by nearly every species in the animal kingdom as indicators of

danger. In contrast, cool colors like blue and green are usually seen as

peaceful.

In addition, players can be trained to understand various aesthetics as

having specific meaning. The LucasArts game X-Wing was one of the

first to have a soundtrack that was procedurally generated by the in-

game situation.

The music would rise in intensity to warn the player

that enemies were attacking. Similarly, as described in Chapter 12,

“Guiding the Player,” the colors bright blue and yellow are used

throughout the Naughty Dog game Uncharted 3 to help the player

identify handholds and footholds for climbing.

6 Other very early games with a procedurally generated soundtracks include Wing Commander (1990)

by Origin Systems and Monkey Island 2: Le Chuck’s Revenge (1991) by LucasArts.

Inscribed Narrative

As with all forms of experience, dramatics and narrative are an important part

of many interactive experiences. However, game narratives face challenges that

are not present in any form of linear media, and as such, writers are still

learning how to craft and present impactful interactive narratives. This section

explores the components of inscribed dramatics, purposes for which they are

used, methods for storytelling in games, and differences between game

narrative and linear narrative.

Components of Inscribed Narrative

In both linear and interactive narrative, the components of the dramatics are the

same: premise, setting, character, and plot.

Premise:

The premise is the narrative basis from which the story

emerges:

7 These are the premises of Star Wars: A New Hope, Half-Life, and Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag.

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, an intergalactic war is brought

to the doorstep of a young farmer who doesn’t yet realize the importance

of his ancestry or himself.

Gordon Freeman has no idea about the surprises that are in store for

him on his first day of work at the top-secret Black Mesa research

facility.

Edward Kenway must fight and pirate his way to fortune on the high

seas of the Caribbean while discovering the secret of the mysterious

Observatory, sought by Templars and Assassins alike.

Setting:

The setting expands upon the skeleton of the premise to

provide a detailed world in which the narrative can take place. The

setting can be something as large as a galaxy far, far away or as small as

a tiny room beneath the stairs, but it’s important that it is believable

within the bounds of the premise and that it is internally consistent; if

your characters choose to fight with swords in a world full of guns, you

need to have a good reason for it.

In Star Wars, when Obi Wan Kenobi gives the lightsaber to Luke, he

answers all of these questions by stating that it is, “not as clumsy or

random as a blaster; an elegant weapon for a more civilized age.”

Character: Stories are about characters, and the best stories are about

characters we care about. Narratively, characters are composed of a

backstory and one or more objectives. These combine to give the

character a role in the story: protagonist, antagonist, companion, lackey,

mentor, and so on.

Plot:

Plot is the sequence of events that take place in your narrative.

Usually, this takes the form of the protagonist wanting something but

having difficulty achieving it because of either an antagonist or an

antagonistic situation getting in the way. The plot then becomes the story

of how the protagonist attempts to overcome this difficulty or

obstruction.

Traditional Dramatics

Though interactive narrative offers many new possibilities to writers and

developers, it still generally follows traditional dramatic structures.

Five-Act Structure

German writer Gustav Freytag wrote about five-act structure in his 1863 book

Die Technik des Dramas (The Technique of Drama). It described the purpose

of the five acts often used by Shakespeare and many of his contemporaries (as

well as Roman playwrights) and proposed what has come to be known as

Freytag’s pyramid (see Figure 4.3). The vertical axis in Figures 4.3 and 4.4

represent the level of audience excitement at that point in the story.

Figure 4.3 Freytag’s pyramid of five-act structure showing examples from

Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare

According to Freytag, the acts work as follows:

Act I: Exposition:

Introduces the narrative premise, the setting, and

the important characters. In Act I of William Shakespeare’s Romeo and

Juliet, we are introduced to Verona, Italy, and the feud between the

powerful Montague and Capulet families. Romeo is introduced as the

son of the Montague family and is infatuated with Rosaline.

Act II: Rising action: Something happens that causes new tension for

the important characters, and the dramatic tension rises. Romeo sneaks

into the Capulet’s ball and is instantly smitten with Juliet, the daughter

of the Capulet family.

Act III: Climax:

Everything comes to a head, and the outcome of the

play is decided. Romeo and Juliet are secretly married, and the local friar

hopes that this may lead to peace between their families. However, the

next morning, Romeo is accosted by Juliet’s cousin Tybalt. Romeo

refuses to fight, so his friend Mercutio fights in his stead, and Tybalt

accidentally kills Mercutio (because Romeo got in the way). Romeo is

furious and chases Tybalt, eventually killing him. Romeo’s decision to

kill Tybalt is the moment of climax of the play because before that

moment, it seems like everything might work out for the two lovers, and

after that moment, the audience knows that things will end horribly.

Act IV: Falling action: The play continues toward its inevitable

conclusion. If it’s a comedy, things get better; if it’s a tragedy, they may

appear to be getting better, but it just gets worse. The results of the

climax are played out for the audience. Romeo is banished from Verona.

The friar concocts a plan to allow Romeo and Juliet to escape together.

He has Juliet fake her death and sends a message to Romeo to let him

know, but the messenger never makes it to Romeo.

Act V: Denouement (pronounced “day-new-maw”): The play

resolves. Romeo enters the tomb believing Juliet to be truly dead and

kills himself. She immediately awakens to find him dead and then kills

herself as well. The families become aware of this tragedy, and everyone

weeps, promising to cease the feud.

Three-Act Structure

In his books and lectures, American screenwriter Syd Field has proposed

another way of understanding traditional narrative in terms of three acts.

Between each act, a plot point changes the direction of the story and forces the

characters’ actions. Figure 4.4 provides an example that is further explained in

the following list.

8 Syd Field, Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting (New York: Delta Trade Paperbacks, 2005).

Figure 4.4 Syd Field’s three-act structure, with examples from Star Wars: A

New Hope

The core elements of Field’s three-act structure are:

Act I: Exposition:

Introduces the audience to the world of the narrative and

presents the premise, setting, and main characters. In Act I of Star Wars, Luke

is a young, idealistic kid who works on his uncle’s moisture farm. There is a

galactic rebellion happening against a fascist Empire, but he’s just a simple

farmer dreaming of flying starfighters.

Hook:

Gets the audience’s attention quickly. According to Field, an

audience decides in the first few minutes whether they’re going to watch

a film, so the first few minutes should be really exciting, even if the

action in them has nothing to do with the rest of the film (e.g., the

beginning of any James Bond film). In Star Wars, the opening scene of

Princess Leia’s ship being attacked by a Star Destroyer had some of the

best special visual effects that 1977 audiences had ever seen and a

fantastic score by John Williams, both of which helped make it an

exciting hook.

Inciting Incident:

Something new enters the life of the main

character, causing them to start the adventure. Luke is leading a pretty

normal life until he finds Leia’s secret message stored inside of R2-D2.

This discovery causes him to seek out “Old Ben” Kenobi, who changes

his life.

First Plot Point:

The first plot point ends the first act and pushes the

protagonist down the path toward the second. Luke has chosen to stay

home and not help Obi-Wan Kenobi, but when he finds that the Empire

has killed his aunt and uncle, he changes his mind and decides to join

Obi-Wan and train to become a Jedi.

Act II: Antagonism:

The protagonist starts their journey, but a series of

obstacles get in the way. Luke and Obi-Wan hire Han Solo and Chewbacca to

help them deliver the secret plans carried by R2-D2 to Alderaan; however,

when they arrive, Alderaan has been destroyed, and their ship is captured by

the Death Star.

Second Plot Point:

The second plot point ends the second act and

pushes the protagonist into their decision of what they will attempt in the

third act. After much struggle, Luke and his friends escape from the

Death Star with both the princess and the plans, but his mentor, Obi-Wan

Kenobi, is killed in the process. The Death Star follows them to the

rebel’s secret base, and Luke must choose whether to aid in the attack on

the Death Star or to leave with Han Solo.

Act III: Resolution:

The story is concluded, and the protagonist either

succeeds or fails. Either way, they emerge from the story with a new

understanding of who they are. Luke chooses to help attack the Death Star and

ends up saving the day.

Climax:

The moment when everything comes to a head and the main

question of the plot is answered. Luke is alone in the Death Star trench

having lost both his wingmen and R2-D2. Just as he is about to be shot

down by Darth Vader, Han and Chewbacca appear to save him, allowing

him a clean shot. Luke chooses to trust the Force over technology and

shoots with his eyes closed, making an extremely difficult shot and

destroying the Death Star.

Falling Action:

The story is resolved, and the new direction of the

protagonist’s life is revealed. Luke and Han (though sadly, not

Chewbacca) are awarded medals by the Rebels and Princess Leia, but

Darth Vader has escaped and lives to fight Luke another day.

In most modern movies and in nearly all video games, the climax is very close

to the end of the narrative with almost no time for falling action or

denouement. One marked example where this is not the case is the game Red

Dead Redemption by Rockstar Games. After the big climax where the main

character, John Marston, finally defeats the man the government hired him to

kill, he is allowed to go home to his family, with the game playing its only sung

musical track as John rides home slowly in the snow. Then, the player is

subjected to a series of rather dull missions where John clears crows out of the

family grain silo, teaches his petulant son to wrangle cattle, and does other

chores around the house. The player feels the boredom of these missions much

like John does. Then, the same government agents that initially hired John

come to his farm to kill him, eventually succeeding in their task. When John

dies, the game fades to black…and then fades back in on the player in the role

of Jack (John’s son) three years after his father’s death. The game returns to

more action-based missions as Jack attempts to track down the agents who

killed his father. This kind of falling action is rare and refreshing to see in

games, and it made the narrative of Red Dead Redemption one of the most

memorable that I’ve played.

Differences Between Interactive and Linear

Narrative

At their core, interactive and linear narratives are quite different because of the

difference in the role of the audience versus the player. Though audience

members certainly bring their own background and interpretations to any

media that they consume, they are still unable to change the actual media itself,

only their perception thereof. However, players are constantly affecting the

media in which they are taking part, and therefore players have actual agency

in the interactive narratives that they experience. This means that authors of

interactive narrative must be aware of some core differences in how they

should approach crafting their narratives.

Plot Versus Free Will

One of the most difficult things to give up when crafting interactive narratives

is control over the plot. Both authors and readers/viewers are accustomed to

plots with elements like foreshadowing, fate, irony, and other ways in which

the intended outcome of the plot influences earlier parts of the story. In a truly

interactive experience, this would be impossible because of the free will of the

player. Without knowing what choices the player will make, it is very difficult

to intentionally foreshadow the results of those choices. However, there are

several possibilities for dealing with this dichotomy, some of which are already

used in digital games and others of which are more common in situations like

pen-and-paper RPGs (but have not yet been implemented in many digital

games):

Limited possibilities:

Limited possibilities are an important part of

nearly all interactive narrative experiences. In fact, most games—at their

inscribed level—are not actually interactive narratives. All the most

popular series of games over the past decade (Assassin’s Creed, Call of

Duty, Halo, Uncharted, and so on) have exclusively linear stories at their

core. No matter what you do in the game, your choices are to either

continue with the narrative or quit the game. Spec Ops: The Line by

Yager Development explored this issue beautifully, placing the player

and the main character of the story in the same position of having only

two real choices: continue to perform increasingly horrific acts or just

stop playing the game. In Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, this is

handled by having the narrator (the prince of the title and the

protagonist) say, “No, no, no; that’s not the way it happened. Shall I start

again?” whenever the player dies and the game has to back up to the

most recent check point. In the Assassin’s Creed series, this is handled

by stating that you have become “desynchronized” from your ancestor’s

story if (through lack of player skill) the ancestor is allowed to die.

There are also several examples of games that limit choices to only a

few possibilities and base those on the player’s actions throughout the

game. Both Fable, by Lionhead Studios, and Star Wars: Knights of the

Old Republic, by BioWare, claimed to be watching the player throughout

the game to determine the final game outcome, but though each did track

the player on a good versus evil scale throughout the game, in both cases

(as in many other games), a single choice made at the end of the game

could override an entire game of good or evil behavior.

Other games, such as the Japanese RPGs Final Fantasy VII and Chrono

Trigger, have more subtle and varied possibilities. In Final Fantasy VII

(1997), there is a point where the main character, Cloud, goes on a date

with someone at the Golden Saucer amusement park. The default is for

Cloud to go out with Aeris; however, if the player has ignored Aeris

throughout the game and kept her out of their battle party, Cloud will

instead go out with Tifa. The possibilities for the date are the characters

Aeris, Tifa, Yuffie, and Barrett, although having the date with Barrett

takes resolute effort. The game never explains that this math is

happening in the background but it is always there, and the Final Fantasy

team used a similar strategy in Final Fantasy X to determine who the

protagonist, Tidus, would ride on a snowmobile with in a romantic

scene. Chrono Trigger uses several metrics to determine which of the

game’s thirteen endings to choose (and some of those endings have

multiple possibilities within them). Again, the calculations for this are

largely invisible to the player.

Allow the player to choose from several linear side quests: Many of

Bethesda Softwork’s open-world games use this strategy, including the

recent games Fallout 4 and Skyrim. Although the main quest is generally

pretty linear for these games, it is only a small fraction of the game’s

total content. As mentioned before, the main quest for Skyrim takes

about 12 to 16 hours to complete, but the game has more than 400 hours

of additional side quests. A player’s reputation and history in the game

lead to some side quests being unlocked and exclude the player from

experiencing others. This means that each individual who plays the

game has the potential to have a different combination of linear

experiences that add up to a different overall game experience from

other players.

Foreshadowing multiple things: If you foreshadow several different

things that might happen, some of them probably will happen. Players

will generally ignore the foreshadowing that is not paid off while

noticing that which does. This happens often in serial television shows

where several possibilities for future plots are put in place but only a few

are ever actually executed. Two examples of this are: 1) the Nebari plot

to take over the universe that is revealed in the Farscape episode “A

Clockwork Nebari” but is never mentioned again and 2) the titular

character from the Doctor Who episode “The Doctor’s Daughter” who

never returns to the show.

Develop minor non-player characters (NPCs) into major ones:

This is a tactic used often by game masters of pen-and-paper RPGs. An

example of this would be if the players were attacked by a group of ten

bandits, and the players defeated the bandits, but one got away. The

game master (GM) could then choose to have that bandit return at some

point with a vendetta against the players for killing his friends. This

differs significantly from games like Final Fantasy VI (originally titled

Final Fantasy III in the U.S.), where it is pretty obvious from early in

the game that Kefka will be a recurring, annoying, and eventually

wholly evil nemesis character. Though the characters in the player’s

party don’t realize this, just the fact that the developers chose to give

Kefka a special sound effect for his laugh makes it apparent to the

player.

The nemesis system in Monolith Productions’ 2014 Lord of the Rings

game Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor (and its 2017 sequel) did exactly

this. Each playthrough, the game would procedurally (i.e., randomly,

with some specific rules) generate several enemy leaders that it placed in

a military hierarchy. The player would often be given missions to

assassinate these leaders, but if one survived his assassination attempt or

killed the player, then that leader would be promoted and grow stronger,

making them more difficult to defeat in the future. Through this system,

each player had completely unique nemeses that grew stronger as they

did, and through this system and some (bad) luck, the player could watch

a weak, lowly Uruk grow in power as you do and become a formidable

late-game foe.

9 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8o6lsjqRr-w and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66Dlc-

nFOUw – accessed July 22, 2021.

Tip

Pen-and-paper RPGs still offer players a unique interactive gaming

experience, and I highly recommend them. In fact, in every intro

game design class I have taught since I started at the University of

Southern California, I have required all my students to run a short

RPG and play in a couple RPGs run by their peers. Roughly 40

percent of the students each semester listed it as their favorite

assignment.

Because pen-and-paper RPGs are run by a person, that game

master (GM) can craft the narrative in real time for the players in a

way that computers have yet to match. GMs use all the strategies

listed earlier to guide their players and make their experiences

seem fated, foreshadowed, or ironic in ways that are usually

reserved for linear narrative.

Empathetic Character Versus Avatar

In linear narratives, the protagonist is often a character with whom the

audience is expected to empathize. When the audience watches Romeo and

Juliet make stupid decisions, they remember being young themselves and

empathize with the feelings that lead the two lovers down their fatal path. In

contrast, the protagonist in an interactive narrative is not a character separate

from the player but instead the player’s avatar in the world. (Avatar is a word

from Sanskrit that refers to the physical embodiment of a god on Earth; in

games, it is the virtual embodiment of the player in the game world.) This can

lead to a dissonance between the actions and personality that the player would

like to have in the world and the personality of the player-character (PC). For

me, this was driven home by my experience with Cloud Strife as the

protagonist of Final Fantasy VII. Throughout the game, Cloud was a little

more petulant than I would have liked, but in general, his silence allowed me to

project my own character onto him. However, after a pivotal scene where

Cloud loses someone close to him, he chose to sit, unresponsive in a

wheelchair instead of fighting to save the world from Sephiroth, as I wanted to.

This dichotomy between the PC’s choice and the choice that I as the player

wanted to make was extremely frustrating for me.

An excellent example of this dichotomy being used to great effect happens in

the fantastic game Okami (2006), by Clover Studio. In Okami, the player

character is Amaterasu, a reincarnation of the goddess of the sun in the form of

a white wolf. However, Amaterasu’s powers have diminished over the past 100

years, and the player must work to reclaim them. About a quarter of the way

through the narrative, the main antagonist, the demon Orochi, chooses a

The perennial RPG Dungeons & Dragons, by Wizards of the

Coast, is a good place to get started, and a tremendous number of

source books are available for it. However, I have found that D&D

campaigns tend to be rather combat-focused, and the combat can

take a very long time. For an experience that allows you to most

easily create and experience interactive stories, I recommended the

FATE Accelerated system by Evil Hat Productions.

See the “Pen-and-Paper Role-Playing Games” section of Appendix

B, “Useful Concepts” for more information.

maiden to be sacrificed to him. Both the player and Amaterasu’s companion,

Issun, know that Amaterasu has only regained a few of her powers at this point,

and the player feels wary of facing Orochi in such a weakened state. However,

despite Issun’s protests, Amaterasu runs directly to the fight. As the music

swells in support of her decision, my feelings as a player changed from

trepidation to temerity, and I, as the player, actually felt like a hero because I

knew that the odds were against me, but I was still doing what needed to be

done.

This character versus avatar dichotomy has been approached several ways in

games and interactive narrative:

Role fulfillment:

By far, the most common approach in games is to

have the player roleplay the game character. When playing character-

driven games like the Tomb Raider or Uncharted series, the player is

playing not themselves but instead Lara Croft or Nathan Drake. The

player sets aside their own personality to fulfill the inscribed personality

of the game’s protagonist.

The silent protagonist:

In a tradition reaching at least as far back as

the first Legend of Zelda game, many protagonists are largely silent.

Other characters talk to them and react as if they’ve said things, but the

player never sees the statements made by the player character. This was

done with the idea that the player could then impress their own

personality on the protagonist rather than being forced into a personality

inscribed by the game developers. However, regardless of what Link

says or doesn’t say, his personality is demonstrated rather clearly by his

actions, and even without Cloud saying a word, players can still

experience a dissonance between their wishes and his actions, as I did.

Multiple dialogue choices:

Many games offer the player multiple

dialogue choices for their character, which can certainly help the player

to feel more in control of the character and their personality. However,

there are a couple of important requirements:

The player must understand the implications of their statement:

Sometimes, a line that may seem entirely clear to the game’s writers

does not seem to have the same connotations to the player. If the

player chooses dialogue that they think is complimentary, but the

writer meant for it to be antagonistic, the NPC’s reaction can seem

very strange to the player.

The choice of statement must matter: Some games offer the player a

fake choice, anticipating that they will make the choice that the game

desires. If, for instance, the player is asked to save the world, and they

just say No, the game will respond with something like, “Oh, you

can’t mean that,” and not actually allow the player a choice.

One fantastic example of multiple dialogue choices being done well is

the dialogue wheel in the Mass Effect series by BioWare. In these games,

the player is presented with a wheel of dialog choices, and the sections

of the wheel are coded with meaning. A choice on the left side of the

wheel will extend the conversation, whereas one on the right side will

shorten it. A choice on the top of the wheel will usually be friendly,

whereas one on the bottom will be surly or antagonistic. By positioning

the dialogue options in this way, the player is granted important

information about the connotations of their possible choices and is not

surprised by the outcome.

Another very different but equally compelling example is Blade Runner

by Westwood Studios (1997). The designers felt that choosing dialogue

options would interrupt the flow of the player experience, so instead of

offering the player a choice between dialogue options at every statement,

the player was able to choose a mood for their character (friendly,

neutral, surly, or random) from the options screen. The protagonist

would act and speak as dictated by his mood without any interruption in

the narrative flow, and the player could change the mood at any time to

alter their character’s response to the situation.

Track player actions and react accordingly: Some games now track

the player’s relationships with various factions and have the faction

members react to the player accordingly. Do a favor for the Orcs, and

they may let you sell goods at their trading post. Arrest a member of the

Thieves Guild, and you might find yourself mugged by them in the

future. This is a common feature of Western open-world roleplaying

games like those by Bethesda Softworks and is in some ways based on

the morality system of eight virtues and three principles that was

introduced in Ultima IV, by Origin Systems, one of the first examples of

complex morality systems in a digital game.

Purposes for Inscribed Dramatics

Inscribed dramatics can serve several purposes in game design:

Evoking emotion: Over the past several centuries, writers have gained

skill in manipulating the emotions of their audiences through dramatics.

This holds true in games and interactive narrative as well, and even

purely linear narrative inscribed over a game can focus and shape the

player’s feelings.

Motivation and justification:

Just as dramatics can shape emotions,

they can also be used to encourage the player to take certain actions or to

justify actions that seem distasteful. This is very true of the fantastic

retelling of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in the game Spec Ops:

The Line. A more positive example comes from The Legend of Zelda:

The Wind Waker. At the beginning of the game, Link’s sister Aryll lets

him borrow her telescope for one day because it’s his birthday. On the

same day, she is kidnapped by a giant bird, and the first part of the game

is driven narratively by Link’s desire to rescue her. The inscribed

storytelling of her giving something to the player before being

kidnapped increases the player’s personal desire to rescue her.

Progression and reward:

Many games use cut scenes and other

inscribed narrative to help the player know where they are in the story

and to reward them for progression. If the narrative of a game is largely

linear, the player’s understanding of traditional narrative structure can

help them to understand where in the three-act structure the game

narrative currently is, and thereby, they can tell how far they have

progressed in the overall plot of the game. Narrative cut scenes are also

often used as rewards for players to mark the end of a level or other

section of the game. This is true in the single-player modes of nearly all

top-selling games with linear narratives (e.g., the Modern Warfare, Halo,

and Uncharted series).

Mechanics reinforcement:

One of the most critical purposes of

inscribed dramatics is the reinforcement of game mechanics. The

German board game Up the River by Ravensburger is a fantastic

example of this. In the game, players are trying to move their three boats

up a board that is constantly moving backward. Calling the board a

“river” reinforces the backward movement game mechanic. A board

space that stops forward progress is called a “sandbar” (as boats often

get hung up on sandbars). Similarly, the space that pushes the player

forward is called a “high tide.” Because each of these elements has

dramatics associated with it, it is much easier to remember than, for

instance, if the player were asked to remember that space #3 stopped the

boat and #7 moved the boat forward.

Inscribed Technology

Much like inscribed mechanics, inscribed technology is largely understood

only through its dynamic behavior. This is true whether considering paper or

digital technology. The choice of how many dice of how many sides each

should be thrown by the player only really matters when those dice are in play,

just as the code written by a programmer is only really understood by the

player when they see the game in action. This is one of the reasons that—as

was pointed out in the discussion of Schell’s Elemental Tetrad in Chapter 2,

“Game Analysis Frameworks“—technology is the least visible of the inscribed

elements.

In addition, a large overlap exists between inscribed mechanics and inscribed

technology. Technology enables mechanics, and mechanical design decisions

can lead to a choice of which technology to use.

Inscribed Paper Game Technology

Inscribed technologies in paper games are often used for randomization, state

tracking, and progression:

Randomization:

Randomization is the most common form of

technology in paper games. This ranges from dice to cards, dominoes,

spinners, and so on. As a designer, you have a lot of control over which

of these you choose and how the randomization works. Randomization

can also be combined with tables to do things like generate random

encounters or characters for a game. In Chapter 11, “Math and Game

Balance,” you can read about the various types of randomizers and when

you might want to use them.

State tracking: State tracking can be everything from keeping track of

the scores of the different players of the game (like a cribbage board) or

tables like the complex character sheets used in some roleplaying games.

Progression: Progression is often inscribed via charts and tables. This

includes things such as player progression of abilities when the player

levels up, the progression of various technologies and units in the

technology tree of a game like Civilization, progression of resource

renewal in the board game Power Grid, and so on.

Inscribed Digital Game Technology

The latter sections of this book extensively cover digital game technology in

the form of programming games using Unity and the C# programming

language. Just as with inscribed paper game technology, the art of game

programming is that of encoding the experience you want the player to have

into inscribed rules (in the form of programming code) that will then be

decoded by the player as she plays the game.

Summary

The four elements of the inscribed layer make up everything that players

receive when they purchase or download your game, and therefore the

inscribed layer is the only one over which the game developers have complete

control. In the next chapter, we allow players to move our games from the

static form of the inscribed layer up to the emergence of the dynamic layer.

Chapter 5. The Dynamic Layer

As players start actually playing a game, it moves from the inscribed

layer into the dynamic layer of the Layered Tetrad. Play, strategy,

and meaningful player choices all emerge in this layer.

This chapter explores the dynamic layer, various qualities of

emergence, and how designers can anticipate the dynamic play that

emerges from their inscribed design decisions.

The Role of the Player

A fellow designer once told me that a game isn’t a game unless someone is

playing it. Although this might sound initially like a rehash of “if a tree falls in

the woods, and there’s no one to hear it, does it make a sound?” it’s actually

much more important for interactive media than any other medium. A film can

still exist and show in a theater if there’s no one to watch it.

Television can be

sent out over the airwaves and still be television, even if no one is tuned to that

station. Games, however, just don’t exist without players, for it is through the

actions of players that games transform from a collection of inscribed elements

into an experience (see Figure 5.1).

Some films, like the Rocky Horror Picture Show, owe a lot of their cult fandom to presentations in

which the audience takes part, and the audience reactions in those films do alter the viewing experience

of the other audience members. However, the film itself is completely unaffected by the audience. The

dynamism in games comes from the ability of the medium to react to the player.

Figure 5.1

Players move the game from the inscribed layer into the dynamic

layer.

There are, of course, some edge cases to this, as there are to all things. The

game Core War is a hacking game where players each try to write a computer

virus that will propagate and take over a fake computer core from the viruses of

their competitors. Players submit their viruses and then have no further

interaction as they wait for the viruses to fight each other for memory and

survival. In the yearly RoboCup tournament, various teams of robots compete

against each other in soccer without any interference by their programmers

during the game. In the classic card game War, players make no decision

beyond the choice of which of the two decks to take at the beginning of the

game, and the game plays out entirely based on the luck of the initial shuffle.

Though in each of these cases, the player has no input and makes no choices

during the actual play of the game, the play is still influenced by player

decisions made before the official start of the match, and the players certainly

have interest in and are waiting for the outcome of the game. In all of these

cases, it still takes players to set up the game and to make the choices that

determine its outcome.

The dynamic layer of the Layered Tetrad encompasses the results of the

intersection of player and game across all four elements of the tetrad:

mechanics, aesthetics, narrative, and technology. Though players have a

tremendous effect on the game and gameplay (including influences on the

elements of the tetrad), players sit outside of the tetrad as the engine that makes

it work. Players cause games to come into being and allow them to become the

experience that has been encoded into the inscribed layer of the game by the

game developers. As designers, we rely on players to aid us in helping the

game to become what we intend. Several aspects of games are completely

beyond our control as designers, including whether the player is actually trying

to follow the rules, whether the player cares about winning or not, the physical

environment in which the game is played, the emotional state of the players,

and so on. Because players are so important, we as developers need to treat

them with respect and take care to ensure that the inscribed elements of the

game, like rules, are clear enough to the players that they can decode them into

the game experience that we intend.

Emergence

The most important concept in this chapter is emergence, the core of which is

that even very simple rules can beget complex dynamic behaviors. Consider

the game of Bartok that you played and experimented with in Chapter 1,

“Thinking Like a Designer.” Though Bartok had very few rules, complex play

emerged from them. After you started changing rules and adding your own,

you were able to see that even simple, seemingly innocuous rule changes had

the potential to lead to large changes in both the feel and the play of the game.

Unexpected Mechanical Emergence

My friend Scott Rogers, author of two books on game design,

once told me

that he “didn’t believe in emergence.” After discussing it with him for a while,

we came to the conclusion that he did believe in emergence, but he didn’t

believe that it was legitimate for game designers to use emergence as an excuse

for irresponsible design. Scott and I both believe that as the designer of the

systems within a game, you are responsible for the play that emerges from

those systems. Of course, it’s extremely difficult to know what possibilities

will emerge from the rules that you put in place, which is why playtesting is so

critically important. As you develop your games, playtest early, playtest often,

and take special care to note unusual things that happen in only one playtest.

After your game is released, and it is out in the wild, the sheer number of

people playing will cause those unusual flukes to happen a lot more often than

you would expect. Of course, this happens to all designers—look at some of

the cards that have been declared illegal in Magic: The Gathering—but as

Scott says, designers must own these issues and take responsibility for

resolving them.

2 Scott Rogers, Level up!: The Guide to Great Video Game Design (Chichester, UK: Wiley, 2010) and

Scott Rogers, Swipe this! The Guide to Great Tablet Game Design (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons,

2012).

Dynamic Mechanics

Dynamic mechanics are the dynamic layer of the elements that separate games

and interactive media from other media—the elements that make them games.

Dynamic mechanics include procedures, meaningful play, strategy, house rules,

player intent, and outcome. As with the inscribed mechanics, many of these are

an expansion of elements described in Tracy Fullerton’s book Game Design

Workshop.

3 Tracy Fullerton, Christopher Swain, and Steven Hoffman, Game Design Workshop: A Playcentric

Approach to Creating Innovative Games (Burlington, MA: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, 2008),

chapters 3 and 5.

Procedures

Mechanics in the inscribed layer included rules: instructions from the designer

to the players about how to play the game. Procedures are the dynamic actions

taken by the players in response to those rules. Another way to say this is that

procedures emerge from rules. In the game Bartok, if you added the rule about

a player needing to announce when they had only one card left, there was an

explicit procedure presented in the rules that the active player needed to do so

(when she had only one card left). However, there was also an implicit

procedure in that rule: the procedure of other players watching the hand of the

active player so that they could catch her if she forgot to announce it. Prior to

this rule, there was no real reason for a player to pay attention to the game

during another person’s turn, but this one rule change altered both the explicit

and implicit procedures of playing the game.

Meaningful Play

In the book Rules of Play, Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman define meaningful

play as play that is both discernable to the player and integrated into the larger

game.

4 Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman, Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals (Cambridge, MA: MIT

Press, 2003), 34.

Discernable:

An action is discernable to the player if the player can

tell that the action has been taken. For example, when you press the call

button for an elevator, the action is discernable because the call button

lights up. If you’ve ever tried to call an elevator when the light inside the

button was burned out, you know how frustrating it can be to take an

action and yet not be able to discern whether the game interpreted your

action.

Integrated:

An action is integrated if the player can tell that it is tied

to the outcome of the game. For example, when you press the call button

for the elevator, that action is integrated because you know that doing so

will cause the elevator to stop on your floor. In Super Mario Bros., the

decision of whether to stomp an individual enemy or just avoid it is

generally not very meaningful because that individual action is not

integrated into the overall outcome of the game. Super Mario Bros.

never gives you a tally of the number of enemies defeated; it only

requires that you finish each level before the time runs out and finish the

game without running out of lives. In HAL Laboratories’ series of Kirby

games, however, the player character Kirby gains special abilities by

defeating enemies, so the decision of which enemy to defeat is directly

integrated into the acquisition of abilities, and the decision is made more

meaningful.

If a player’s actions in the game are not meaningful, they can quickly lose

interest. Salen and Zimmerman’s concept of meaningful play reminds

designers to constantly think about the mindset of the player and whether the

interactions of their games are transparent or opaque from the player’s

perspective.

Strategy

When a game allows meaningful actions, players will usually create strategies

to try to win the game. A strategy is a calculated set of actions to help the

player achieve a goal. However, that goal can be anything of the player’s

choosing and does not necessarily need to be the goal of winning the game. For

instance, when playing with a young child or with someone of a lower skill

level in a game, the player’s goal might be to make sure that the other person

enjoys playing the game and learns something, sometimes at the expense of the

player winning the game.

Optimal Strategy

When a game is very simple and has few possible actions, it is possible for

players to develop an optimal strategy for the game. If both players of a game

are playing rationally with the goal of winning, an optimal strategy is the

possible strategy with the highest likelihood of winning. Most games are too

complex to have a true optimal strategy, but some games like Tic-Tac-Toe are

simple enough to allow one. In fact, Tic-Tac-Toe is so simple that chickens

have (possibly) been trained to play it and force a draw or a win almost every

time.

5 Kia Gregory, “Chinatown Fair Is Back, Without Chickens Playing Tick-Tack-Toe, “ New York Times,

June 10, 2012.

An optimal strategy is more often a fuzzy idea of the kind of thing that would

likely improve a player’s chance of winning. For instance, in the board game

Up the River by Manfred Ludwig, players are trying to move three boats up a

river to dock at the top of the game board, and arriving at the dock is worth 12

points to the first boat to arrive, then 11 points for the second boat, and down to

only 1 point for the twelfth boat. At the end of every round (that is, every time

that all players have taken one turn), the river moves backward 1 space, and

any boat that falls off the end of the river (the waterfall) is lost. Each turn, the

player rolls 1d6 (a single six-sided die) and chooses which boat to move.

Because the average roll of a six-sided die is 3.5, and a player must choose

from among their three boats to move every turn, each boat will move an

average of 3.5 spaces every three of their turns. However, the board will move

backward 3 spaces every three turns, so each boat only makes an average

forward progression of 0.5 spaces every three turns (or 0.1666 (or 1/6) spaces

every turn).

There are additional rules of the game that I’m omitting for the sake of simplicity in this example.

In Up the River, the optimal strategy is for the player to never move one of

their boats and just let it fall off the waterfall. Then each boat would move

forward an average of 3.5 spaces every two turns instead of three. With the

board moving backward 2 spaces in two turns, this would give each of her

boats an average movement forward of 1.5 spaces every two turns (or 0.75

spaces each turn), which is much better than the 0.1666 afforded to the player

if they had tried to keep all of their boats. With only two boats, a player would

have a better chance of getting to the dock in first and second place, giving

them 23 total points (12 + 11). In a two-player game, this strategy wouldn’t

work because the second player would tie up at 10, 9, and 8 for 27 points, but

in a three- or four-player game, it’s the closest thing to an optimal strategy for

Up the River, as long as only one player does it. However, the other players’

choices, randomized outcomes of the dice, and additional factors mean that it

won’t always ensure a win; it will just make a win more likely.

Designing for Strategy

As a designer, you can do several things to make strategy more important in

your game. For now, the main thing to keep in mind is that presenting the

player with multiple possible ways to win will require them to make more

difficult strategic decisions during play. In addition, if some of these goals

conflict with each other while others are complementary (i.e., some of the

requirements for the two goals are the same), this can actually cause individual

players to move into certain roles as the game progresses. Once a player can

see that they are starting to fulfill one of the goals, they will pick other

complementary goals to pursue as well, and this will lead them to make tactical

decisions that fulfill the role for which those goals were designed. If these

goals cause them to take a specific type of action in the game, it can alter their

in-game relationship with other players.

An example of this comes from the game Settlers of Catan, designed by Klaus

Teuber. In this game, players acquire resources through random die rolls and

trade, and some of the five game resources are useful in the early game, while

others are useful at the end. Three that are less useful at the beginning are

sheep, wheat, and ore; however, together, the three can be traded for a

development card. The most common development card is the soldier card,

which allows the player to steal from another player. Therefore, an excess of

ore, wheat, and sheep at the beginning of the game can lead the player to

purchase development cards, and because having the largest number of soldier

cards played can earn the player victory points, the combination of that

resource and that potential goal can influence the player to rob the other

players more often and directly encourages them to play the role of the bully in

the game.

House Rules

House rules occur when the players themselves intentionally modify the rules.

As you saw in the Bartok game example, even a simple rule change can have

drastic effects on gameplay. For instance, most players of Monopoly have

house rules that cut the auction of property (which would normally happen if a

player landed on an unowned property and chose not to buy it) and add

collection of all fines to the Free Parking space to be picked up by any player

who lands on that space. The removal of the auction rule removes nearly all

potential strategy from the beginning of Monopoly (converting it into an

extremely slow random property distribution system), and the second rule

removes some determinism from the game (because it could benefit any player,

either the one in the lead or in last place), making the game more random.

Though the first house rule in this example makes the game a bit worse, most

house rules are intended to make games considerably more fun.

In all cases,

house rules are an example of the players beginning to take some ownership of

the game, making it a little more theirs and a little less the original designer’s.

The fantastic thing about house rules is that they are many people’s first

experimentation with game design.

If you’re ever playing the card game Lunch Money by Atlas Games, try allowing players to attack

another player, heal themselves, and discard any cards they don’t want each turn (rather than having to

choose one of the three). It makes the game a lot more frantic!

Player Intent: Bartle’s Types, Cheaters, Spoilsports

One thing that you have little or no control over is the intent of your players.

Among players of games who are playing rationally and trying to win, you will

find the four distinct personality types defined by Richard Bartle, one of the

designers of the first MUD (Multi-User Dungeon, a text-based online ancestor

of modern massively multiplayer online roleplaying games). The four types of

players that he defined have existed since his early MUD and carry through all

multiplayer games today. His 1996 article, “Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades:

Players Who Suit MUDs,”

contains fantastic information on how these types

of players interact with the game and each other as well as information about

how to grow your community of players in positive ways.

8 Richard Bartle, “Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades: Players Who Suit Muds,”

http://www.mud.co.uk/richard/hcds.htm — accessed July 22, 2021.

Bartle’s four types (which he identified with the four suits of a deck of cards)

are as follows:

Achiever (Diamond): Wants to get the highest score in the game.

Seeks to dominate the game. In online games, you will find Achievers at

the top of the leaderboards.

Explorer (Spade): Wants to find all the hidden places in the game.

Seeks to understand the game. Explorers will often post images online of

locations that are difficult to reach in the game or of glitches that they’ve

discovered.

Socializer (Heart):

Wants to play the game with friends. Seeks to

understand the other players. Socializers will have a large friends list and

are most likely to be members of guilds, though they aren’t always

interested in leading these guilds.

Killer (Club):

Wants to provoke other players of the game. Seeks to

dominate the other players. However, current thinking holds that many

Killers mostly want to be seen as powerful by other players, so a Killer

might lead a guild or even take on the role of a mentor in the game, if it

is offered to them. Giving Killers opportunities for recognition that don’t

involve them hurting other players can make your game a much more

positive experience for other types of players.

Bartle’s original article disagrees with this idea of redirecting Killers into positive roles; he stated

many times in the article that the Killer only has fun if they ruin someone else’s day. However, in his

book Designing Virtual Worlds, Bartle adds an Implicit—Explicit dimension to the 2x2 continuum in

Figure 5.2 that splits Killers into Griefers (Implicit) and Politicians (Explicit), with the Politicians

working long-term to gain positive fame within a community. Richard A. Bartle Designing Virtual

Worlds (Berkeley, CA: New Riders, 2006).

Figure 5.2 Richard Bartle’s four players who suit MUDs

These can be understood as belonging to a 2x2 continuum (also from Bartle’s

article). Figure 5.2 represents this graphically.

Other theories of player motivation and player types certainly exist,

but

Bartle’s are the most widely recognized and understood in the game industry.

10 See Nick Yee’s “Motivations of Play in Online Games,” Journal of CyberPsychology and Behavior,

9, 772–775. Available at http://www.nickyee.com/pubs/Yee - Motivations (2006).pdf — accessed July

22, 2021.

Two other player types that you may encounter are cheaters and spoilsports:

Cheaters: Care about winning but don’t care about the integrity of the

game. Cheaters will bend or break the rules to win.

Spoilsports: Don’t care about winning or about the game. Spoilsports

will often break the game to ruin other players’ experiences.

Neither of these are players that you want in your game, but you need to

understand their motivations. For instance, if a cheater feels that they have a

chance of winning legitimately, they may not feel as driven to cheat.

Spoilsports are much more difficult to deal with because they don’t care about

the game or winning, but you rarely have to deal with spoilsports in digital

single-player games, because they would have no reason to play the game if

they weren’t interested in it in the first place. However, even great players can

sometimes become spoilsports when they encounter terrible game mechanics…

often right before they choose to turn the game off.

Outcome

Outcome is the result of playing the game. All games have an outcome. Many

traditional games are zero sum, meaning that one player wins and the other

loses. However, this is not the only kind of outcome that a game can have. In

fact, every individual moment in a game can be seen as having its own

outcome. Most games have several different levels of outcome:

Immediate outcome: Each individual action has an outcome. When a

player attacks an enemy, the outcome of that attack is either a miss or a

hit and the resultant damage to the enemy. When a player purchases

property in Monopoly, the outcome is that the player has less money

available but now owns the potential to earn more money.

Quest outcome:

In many games, the player will be sent on missions or

quests and will gain some sort of reward for completing that quest.

Missions and quests often have narratives constructed around them (e.g.,

a little girl has lost her balloon in Spider-Man 2, so Spider-Man must

retrieve it for her), and the outcome of the quest also marks the end of

the tiny narrative surrounding it.

Cumulative outcome:

This outcome occurs when the player finally

achieves a goal that they have been working toward over a significant

amount of time. One of the most common examples of this is leveling up

in a game with experience points (XP). Everything that the player does

accrues a few experience points, and when the total number of XP has

reached a threshold, the player’s in-game character gains a new level,

which grants the character a boost in stats or abilities. The main

difference between this and a quest outcome is that the cumulative

outcome usually doesn’t have a narrative wrapped around it, and the

player often reaches the cumulative outcome passively while actively

doing something else (e.g., a player of Dungeons & Dragons 5

Edition

actively takes part in a game session and then, while adding up earned

XP at the end of the evening, notices that they have exceeded 23,000 XP

and achieved level 7).

Jeremy Crawford, Mike Mearls, Rodney Thompson, Peter Lee, James Wyatt, Robert J. Schwalb,

Bruce R. Cordell, et al. Dungeons & Dragons Player’s Handbook 5th Edition (Renton, WA: Wizards of

the Coast LLC, 2014), p. 15.

Final outcome:

Most games have an outcome that ends the game. For

example, one player wins chess (and the other loses), a player finishes

Final Fantasy VII and saves the world from Sephiroth, and so on. There

are some games where the final outcome doesn’t end the game (e.g., in

Skyrim, even when the player has finished the main quest, they can still

continue to play in the world and experience other quests).

Interestingly, the death of the player character is very rarely a final

outcome in games. In the few games where death is a final outcome

(e.g., the classic computer game Rogue and other “roguelikes” where a

single loss will cause the player to lose all progress in the game

), the

individual game session is usually relatively short so that the player

doesn’t feel a tremendous loss at the death of their player character. In

most games, however, death is just a temporary setback and in-game

checkpoints usually ensure that the player never loses more than a few

minutes of progress in the game.

12 Even most modern roguelikes, like Dead Cells or the excellent endless runner Alto’s Odyssey, allow

the player to earn permanent upgrades or experience points in a run of the game that will increase their

success in future plays of the game.

Dynamic Aesthetics

Just as with dynamic mechanics, dynamic aesthetics are those that emerge

when playing the game. The two different primary categories are

Procedural aesthetics: Aesthetics that are programmatically generated

by digital game code (or via the application of mechanics in a paper

game). These include procedural music and art that emerge directly from

inscribed aesthetics and technology.

Environmental aesthetics:

These are the aesthetics of the

environment in which the game is played, and they are largely beyond

the control of the game developers.

Procedural Aesthetics

Procedural aesthetics, as we generally think of them in digital games, are

created programmatically by combining technology and inscribed aesthetics.13

These are called procedural because they arise from procedures (also known as

functions) that have been written as programming code. The cascading

waterfall of objects that is created in the first programming chapter (Chapter

19, “Hello World: Your First Program”) could be considered procedural art

because it is an interesting visual that emerges from C# programming code. In

professional games, two of the most common forms of procedural aesthetics

are music and visual art. People often find it useful to approach the

development of procedural aesthetics through experimentation, which has

made visual programming tools extremely useful in this field. VFX Graph and

Shader Graph are visual programming tools that Unity has developed for

creating procedural aesthetics. Similarly, tools like Apple’s Garage Band

enable composers to experiment with musical compositions in a playful way.

There are also examples of procedural art in board games—including things like the map created by

the progressive laying of tiles in Carcassonne—but the most common type of procedural game art is

digital.

Procedural Music

Procedural music

has become very common in modern videogames, with the

most popular audio engines being Audiokinetic’s Wwise

and Firelight

Technologies’ FMOD.

There are several different methods for creating

procedural music, including:

14 Thanks to my friends Vincent Diamante (composer and audio programmer for Flower, Skullgirls,

and Sky) and Dr. Ryan Thompson (musicologist and professor at Michigan State University) for their

help with this section.

15 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audiokinetic_Wwise — You can learn about Wwise integration in

Unity at https://www.audiokinetic.com/library/edge/?source=Unity&id=index.html — accessed June

20, 2021.

16 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FMOD — You can learn about FMOD integration in Unity at

https://www.fmod.com/unity — accessed June 20, 2021.

Horizontal Re-Sequencing (HRS): HRS rearranges the order of

several precomposed sections of music according to the emotional

impact that the designers want for the current moment in the game. An

early example of this is LucasArts’ iMUSE (Interactive MUsic

Streaming Engine), which was used in the X-Wing game series as well as

many of LucasArts’ adventure games. In X-Wing, the pre-composed

music is a combination of MIDI

arrangements of John Williams’ score

for the Star Wars films and original music by Peter McConnell, Michael

Z. Land, and Clint Bajakian. Using iMUSE—a system created by

McConnell and Land—designers are able to play peaceful music when

the player is just flying through space, ominous music when enemy

forces are about to attack, victory music whenever a player achieves an

objective, and so on. There are also longer sections of music that are

meant to loop and provide a single mood as well as very short sections

of music (one or two measures in length) that are used to mask the

transition from one mood to the next. This is currently the most common

type of procedural music technology and harkens at least as far back as

Super Mario Bros., which played a transitional musical stinger (a short

interruption of the soundscape) and then switched to a faster version of

the background music when the player had less than 99 seconds left to

complete the current level.

17 MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) is a technical standard for electronic music and control,

initially published by Dave Smith and Chet Wood. It was used frequently for computer games because

the MIDI sequencer could play a simple sample (an audio clip of a single note from an instrument) at

any pitch, keeping the file size of music extremely small.

Vertical Re-Orchestration (VRO):

VRO includes recordings of

various tracks of a single song that can be individually enabled or

disabled. This is used very commonly in rhythm games like PaRappa

the Rapper and Frequency. In PaRappa, there are four different tracks of

music representing four different levels of success for the player. The

player’s success is ranked every few measures, and if they either drop or

increase in rank, the background music switches to a worse- or better-

sounding track to reflect this. In Frequency and its sequel Amplitude, the

player controls a craft traveling down a tunnel, the walls of which

represent various tracks in a studio recording of a song. When the player

succeeds at the rhythm game on a certain wall, that track of the

recording is enabled.

VRO like this is nearly ubiquitous in rhythm

games—with the fantastic Japanese rhythm game Osu! Tatakae!

Ouendan and its Western successor Elite Beat Agents as marked

exceptions—and has also become common in other games to give the

player musical feedback on the health of their character, speed of their

vehicle, and so on.

Amplitude also includes a mode where players can choose which tracks to enable at any point in the

song to use both HRS and VRO to create their own remix of the tracks included with the game.

A similar effect to VRO can also be achieved through filtering the audio

before it is sent to the speakers. This can be easily achieved in Unity

using the built-in Audio Mixer,

which includes several filters (e.g.,

high pass, low pass, flange, distortion, reverb, etc.). In a stealth project I

made for Unity,

I used the Audio Mixer to dampen the high notes in

the music (low-pass filter) and remove the low, heavy tones from the

footsteps (high-pass filter) whenever the player moved into stealth mode.

This helped accentuate the difference between being in and out of stealth

mode without requiring separate audio clips for each state.

https://docs.unity3d.com/2020.3/Documentation/Manual/AudioMixer.html

20 I created the Unity Certified Programmer Exam Review Specialization for Unity that you can access

for free at https://www.coursera.org/specializations/unity-certified-programmer. The final course in the

specialization makes use of the Audio Mixer.

Procedural COmposition (PCO):

PCO is the rarest form of

procedural music because it takes the most time and skill to create. In

PCO, rather than rearrange various precomposed sections of music or

enable and disable precomposed tracks, the computer program actually

composes music from individual notes based on programmed rules of

composition, pacing, etc. One of the earliest commercial experiments in

this realm was C.P.U. Bach by Sid Meier and Jeff Brigs, a title for the

3DO console. In C.P.U. Bach, the listener/player was able to select

various instruments and parameters, and the game would craft a Bach-

like musical composition based on procedural rules.

Another fantastic example of procedural composition is the music

created by composer and game designer Vincent Diamante for the game

Flower by thatgamecompany. For the game, Diamante created both

precomposed sections of music (with tracks designed for vertical re-

orchestration) and rules for procedural composition. During gameplay,

background music is usually playing—which is continuously remixed

from up to 10 music tracks based on the situation using VRO—while the

player flies over flowers in a field and opens them by passing near. Each

flower that is opened creates a single note as it blooms, and Diamante’s

PCO engine chooses a note for that flower that will blend harmoniously

with the precomposed music to create a melody along with other flower

notes. Regardless of when the player passes over a flower, the system

will choose a note that fits well with the current audio soundscape, and

passing over several flowers in sequence will procedurally generate

pleasing melodies.

Procedural Visual Art

Procedural visual art is created when programming code acts dynamically to

create in-game visuals. You are probably already familiar with a few forms of

procedural visuals:

Particle systems:

As the most common form of procedural visuals,

particle systems are seen in almost every game these days. The dust

cloud that rises when Mario lands a jump in Super Mario Galaxy, the

fire effects in Uncharted 3, and the sparks that appear when cars crash

into each other in Burnout are all various versions of particle effects.

Unity has been through three different particle effects engines over the

past decade, culminating in the current VFX Graph, which allows artists

to use a visual programming language to create and manage procedural

visual effects (see Figure 5.3).

Figure 5.3 Various visual and particle effects created using VFX Graph in

Unity

21 You can download the Unity VFX Graph Samples project from GitHub at https://github.com/Unity-

Technologies/VisualEffectGraph-Samples — accessed July 24, 2021.

Procedural animation: Procedural animation covers everything from

flocking behavior for groups of creatures to the brilliant procedural

animation engine in Will Wright’s Spore that created walk, run, attack,

and other animations for any creature that a player could design. With

normal, key-framed animation, the animated creatures always follow the

exact paths inscribed by the animator. In procedural animation, the

animated creatures follow procedural rules that emerge into complex

motion and behavior. You will get some experience with the flocking

behavior known as “boids” in Chapter 27, “Object-Oriented Thinking”

(see Figure 5.4).

Figure 5.4 Boids, an example of procedural animation from Chapter 27,

“Object-Oriented Thinking”

Most modern game engines also allow animation blending, which is a

way of mixing several different key-framed animations into a semi-

procedural animation that fits the situation. An example of this can be

seen in the Uncharted series of games any time a character is running

while turning their torso and looking in another direction. In this case,

the separate key-frame animations for running and for turning to look at

something have been blended together.

22 Unity implements this kind of animation blending through Blend Trees, which you can read about at

https://docs.unity3d.com/2020.3/Documentation/Manual/class-BlendTree.html — accessed July 22,

2021

Shaders:

A shader is the code that tells your graphics card (or

computer) how to turn scene data (model, camera, textures, lights, etc.)

into an actual scene. Given different shaders, the same scene can appear

very differently. Unity’s Shader Graph visual scripting environment

enables you to create various shaders in a visual way (very similar to

how particle effects are created in VFX Graph). See Figure 5.5.

Figure 5.5

Several different shaders applied to the exact same model and

textures. From left to right: Standard, Color Rim, Color Gradient, Sliced,

Toon Ramp, Texture Dissolve, Hologram, Liquid Noise, and Phase Out.23

Model and shaders are from the public Unity Shader Graph Example Library available on GitHub at

https://github.com/UnityTechnologies/ShaderGraph_ExampleLibrary — accessed July 26, 2021. All

shaders were created by Unity using Shader Graph. Some tweaking by me so the shaders worked in

Unity 2020.3 LTS.

Procedural environments: The most obvious example of a procedural

environment in games is the world of Minecraft by Mojang. Each time a

player starts a new game of Minecraft, an entire world (billions of square

kilometers in size) is created for them to explore from a single seed

number (known as the random seed). Because digital random number

generators are never actually random, this means that anyone who starts

from the same seed will get the same world.

Environmental Aesthetics

The other major kind of dynamic aesthetics are those controlled by the actual,

real-life physical environment in which the game is played. Although these are

largely beyond the control of the game designer, it is still the designer’s

responsibility to understand what environmental aesthetics might arise and

accommodate them as much as possible.

Visual Play Environment

Players will play games in a variety of settings and on a variety of equipment,

so as a designer you must be aware of the issues that this may cause. You

should accommodate two elements in particular:

Brightness of the environment:

Most game developers tend to work

in environments where the light level is carefully controlled to make the

images on their screen as clear as possible. Players don’t always interact

with games in environments with perfect lighting. If your player is on a

computer outside, playing on a projector, or playing anywhere else with

imperfect control of lighting, it can be very difficult for them to clearly

see scenes in your game that have a low level of brightness (e.g., a scene

taking place in a dark cave). Remember to make sure that your visual

aesthetic either has a lot of contrast in it between light and dark or allows

the player the ability to adjust the gamma or brightness level of the

visuals. Another common way to handle this in more modern games is to

use HDR (High Dynamic Range) lighting to simulate the human eye’s

ability to adjust to brighter and darker environments by respectively

contracting and expanding the iris. In games like Assassin’s Creed:

Odyssey and many others, you see this effect when you enter a cave.

Initially, the cave is very dark, but then the in-game camera simulates the

irises of the player character’s eyes adjusting by raising the brightness of

the entire scene (making it much easier to see in the dark cave).

Considering the brightness of the environment is especially important if

designing for a phone or other mobile device, because these can easily

be played outside in direct sunlight and rarely include rendering

powerful enough to utilize HDR.

Resolution and size of the player’s screen:

If you are developing for

a fixed-screen device such as a specific model of iPad or portable

console (like the Nintendo Switch, which supports only 720p and 1080p

resolutions), this shouldn’t be an issue. However, if you’re designing for

a computer or traditional game console, you have very little control over

the resolution, quality, or size of your player’s screen, particularly if it’s

a console game. You cannot assume that your player will have a 1080p

screen, nor can you assume that the physical size of the screen will be

large enough for the player to actually see the detail of a 1080p screen. I

see this issue frequently with games that were designed for other

consoles and are ported to the Nintendo Switch. A letter that is 24 pixels

tall is about 1” high on a 60” 720p television,

but on the 6.2” screen of

the original Switch, a letter that is 24 pixels tall is only one tenth of an

inch high, which is much more difficult to see!

A player on a Switch

Lite (that cannot connect to a television to run the game on a larger

screen) would have an extremely difficult time reading text at that size,

even at the close distance that most people hold a Switch. The solution

to this is to carefully consider the screen on which your games will be

played and adjust to the needs of your players.

Television sizes are generally the size of the screen when measured diagonally. So, a 60” 720p

television screen is about 52.3” wide by 29.4” tall with about 24.5ppi (pixels per inch). In metric, this is

152.4cm diagonal, 133.8cm wide by 75cm tall, and 9.64 pixels per cm.

The 6.2” 720p screen on the original Switch is about 5.3” wide by 3” tall wutg about 237ppi. In

metric, this is 15.75cm diagonal, 13.7cm wide by 7.7cm tall, and 93.2 pixels per cm. So, the 24 pixel

letter that is 1” tall on a 60” screen is 0.1” on an original Switch (0.26cm).

Auditory Play Environment

As with the visual play environment, you rarely have control over the audio

environment in which your game is played. Though this is most essential to

accommodate when making a mobile game, it’s also important to keep in mind

for other platforms. Things to consider include the following:

Noisy environments: Any number of things might be happening at the

same time as your game, so you need to make sure that your player can

still play even if they miss or can’t hear some of the audio. You also

need to make sure that the game itself doesn’t create an environment so

noisy that the player misses critical information. In general, important

dialog and spoken instructions should be the loudest sounds in your

game, and the rest of the mix should be kept a little quieter. You will also

want to avoid subtle, quiet audio cues for anything important in the

game.

Player-controlled game volume:

The player might mute your game.

This is especially true with mobile games where you can never count on

the player to be listening. For any game, make sure that you have

alternatives to sound. If you have important dialogue, make sure to allow

the player to turn on subtitles. If you have sound cues to inform players

of where things are, make sure to include visual cues as well.

Player Considerations

Another critical thing to consider about the environment in which your game

will be played is the player themselves. Not all players have the optimal ability

to sense all five aesthetics. A player who is deaf should really be able to play

your game with little trouble, especially if you follow the advice in the last few

paragraphs. However, many designers miss two other considerations in

particular:

Colorblindness:

About 8 percent of men have some form of

colorblindness (colorblindness is much less common among women).

Several different forms of deficiency exist in color perception, the most

common of which causes a person to be unable to differentiate between

similar shades of red, yellow, and green (i.e., red, yellow, and green

colors that would be the same shade of gray when converted to

grayscale). Because colorblindness is so common, you should be able to

find a colorblind friend whom you can ask to playtest your game and

make sure that key information isn’t being transmitted by color in a way

that they can’t see. However, the best way I have found to check your

game is to download a smartphone app that will modify what you see

through the camera to simulate various kinds of colorblindness.

Karen

Stevens, a Software Engineer on the Madden NFL franchise, gave an

excellent talk at the 2017 Game Developers Conference about how she

fixed several issues with colorblindness in the Madden games.

Color vision deficiency has a prevalence of 8 percent for men and 0.4 percent for women and is

more common among men with European ancestry.

https://apfmj.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12930-014-0010-3 — accessed July 22, 2021.

27 My favorite app for this is Chromatic Vision Simulator by Kazunori Asada, available for iOS and

Android.

28 You can see all of her talk at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1FwCACS1C0 — accessed July

22, 2021.

Epilepsy and migraine:

Both migraines and epileptic seizures can be

caused by rapidly flashing lights, and children with epilepsy are

particularly prone to having seizures triggered by light. In 1997, an

episode of the Pokémon television show in Japan triggered simultaneous

seizures in hundreds of viewers because of flickering images in one

scene.

Nearly all games now ship with a warning that they may cause

epileptic seizures, but the occurrence of that is now very rare because

developers have accepted the responsibility to think about the effect their

games might have on their players and largely removed rapidly flashing

lights from their games.

29 Sheryl WuDunn, “TV Cartoon’s Flashes Send 700 Japanese Into Seizures,” New York Times,

December 18, 1997.

Dynamic Narrative

There are several ways of looking at narrative from a dynamic perspective. The

epitome of the form is the experience of players and their game master when

playing a traditional pen-and-paper roleplaying game. Although there have

certainly been experiments into crafting truly interactive digital narratives, after

more than 40 years, they still haven’t reached the level of interaction in a well-

run game of Dungeons & Dragons (D&D). The reason that D&D can create

such fantastic dynamic narratives is that the dungeon master (DM: the player

running the game for the others) is constantly considering the desires, fears,

and evolving skills of her players and crafting a story around them. As

mentioned earlier in this book, if the players run into a low-level enemy that

(due to random die rolls working in its favor) is very difficult to defeat, the DM

can choose to have that enemy escape at the last minute and then return later in

the story as a nemesis for the players. A human DM can adapt the game and

the game narrative to the players in a way that is very difficult for a computer

to replicate.

Interactive Narrative Incunabula

In 1997, Janet Murray, a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology,

published the book Hamlet on the Holodeck

in which she examined the early

history of interactive narrative in relation to the early history of other forms of

narrative media. In her book, Murray explores the incunabular stages of other

media, which is the stage when that medium was between its initial creation

and its mature form. For instance, in the incunabular stage of film, directors

were attempting to shoot 10-minute versions of Hamlet and King Lear (due to

the 10-minute length of a single reel of 16mm film), and incunabular television

was largely just televised versions of popular radio programs. Through

comparisons to many examples from various media, Murray proceeds to talk

about the growth of interactive digital fiction and where it is currently in its

incunabular stage. She covers early Infocom text adventure games such as the

Zork series and Planetfall and points out two very compelling aspects that

make interactive fiction unique.

30Janet Horowitz Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck (New York: Free Press, 1997).

Interactive Fiction Happens to the Player

Unlike nearly every other form of narrative, interactive fiction is happening

directly to the player. The following happens near the beginning of the Infocom

game Zork.

(The lines preceded by a right angle bracket [e.g.,

> open trap

door

] are the commands entered by the player.)

31 Zork was created at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1977–79 by Tim Anderson, Marc

Blank, Bruce Daniels, and Dave Lebling. They formed Infocom in 1979 and released Zork as a

commercial product.

…With the rug moved, the dusty cover of a closed trap door

appears.

open trap door

The door reluctantly opens to reveal a rickety staircase

descending into darkness.

down

It is pitch dark. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.

light lamp

The lamp is now on.

You are in a dark and damp cellar with a narrow passageway

leading

east and a crawlway to the south. To the west is the bottom of

The key element here is that you hear someone barring it. You are now trapped.

Interactive fiction is the only narrative medium where the player/reader is the

character taking actions and suffering consequences in the narrative.

Relationships Are Developed Through Shared Experience

Another compelling aspect of interactive fiction is that it allows the player to

develop a relationship with other characters through shared experience. Murray

cites Planetfall,

another Infocom text adventure, as a fantastic example of

this. Following the destruction of the spaceship on which they were a janitor,

the player is largely alone for the first section of Planetfall. Eventually, they

come across a machine to make warrior robots, but when they engage it, it

malfunctions and produces a child-like, mostly useless robot named Floyd.

Floyd follows the player around for the remainder of the game and does little

more than provide comic relief. Much later in the game, there is a device

locked in a bio-lab that the player must retrieve, but the lab is full of both

radiation and vicious aliens. Immediately, Floyd simply says “Floyd go get!”

and enters the lab to retrieve the item. Floyd soon returns, but he is leaking oil

and barely able to move. He dies in the player’s arms as the player sings The

Ballad of the Starcrossed Miner to him. Many players reported to the designer

of Planetfall, Steven Meretzky, that they cried when Floyd died, and Murray

cites this as one of the first examples of a tangible emotional connection

between a player and an in-game character.

32 Planetfall was designed by Steve Meretzky and published by Infocom in 1983.

Emergent Narrative

True dynamic narrative emerges when the players and game mechanics

contribute to the story. Several years ago, I was playing in a Dungeons &

Dragons 3.5 Edition game with some friends. The game master had us in a

pretty tight spot. We had just retrieved an artifact from some forces of evil in

another dimension and were being chased by a large balrog

as we fled down

a narrow cave on our flying carpet toward the portal back to our dimension. It

was gaining on us quickly, and our weapons were having little effect. However,

steep metal ramp which is unclimbable.

The door crashes shut, and you hear someone barring it.

I remembered a little-used property of the Rod of Splendor that I possessed.

Once per week, I could use the Rod of Splendor to create a “huge pavilion of

silk, 60 feet across, inside of which were the furnishings and food for a party to

entertain 100 people.”

Usually, we would use this capability of the rod to

throw a party when we’d finished a mission, but this time I cast the tent

directly behind us in the tunnel. Because the tunnel was only 30 feet wide, the

balrog crashed into the tent and became entangled, allowing us to escape

without anyone dying.

A balrog is the giant winged demon of fire and smoke that faced Gandalf in the “you shall not pass”

scene of The Fellowship of the Ring by J. R. R. Tolkien.

The Dungeons & Dragons 3.5e System Reference Document entry for the Rod of Splendor is at

http://www.d20srd.org/srd/magicItems/rods.htm#splendor — accessed July 22, 2021.

This kind of unexpected story emerges from a combination of the situation

created by the game master, the game’s rules, and the creativity of individual

players. I have encountered many similar stories through the roleplaying

campaigns that I have been part of (as both a player and game master), and you

can do several things to encourage this kind of collaborative storytelling in

roleplaying campaigns that you run. For more information about roleplaying

games and how to run a good campaign, see the “Pen-and-Paper Roleplaying

Games” section of Appendix B, “Useful Concepts.”

Dynamic Technology

As with the previous chapter, because other large sections of this book are

devoted to game technology, it is covered very little in this chapter. The core

concept for you to know at this point is that the game code you author (your

inscribed technology) will be a system that runs as the player is experiencing

the game. As with all dynamic systems, emergence will occur, and this means

that there is both the opportunity for wonderful, unexpected things to happen

and the danger of horrible, unexpected things happening. Dynamic technology

covers all the runtime behavior of your code and the ways in which it affects

the player. This could be anything from a system to simulate physics, to

artificial intelligence, to anything else that is implemented in your code.

To find information on the dynamic behavior of paper game technologies such

as dice, spinners, cards, and other randomizers, look to Chapter 11, “Math and

Game Balance.” For information on digital game technologies, you can look to

the latter two parts of the book as well as Appendix B, “Useful Concepts.”

Summary

Dynamic mechanics, aesthetics, narrative, and technology all emerge from the

act of players playing a game. Although the elements that emerge can be

challenging to predict, it is the responsibility of designers understand the

envelope of that emergence.

The next chapter explores the cultural layer of the Layered Tetrad, the layer

beyond gameplay. In the cultural layer, players gain more control over the

game than the original game developers, and the cultural layer is the only layer

of the tetrad that is experienced by members of society who do not ever play

the game.

Chapter 6. The Cultural Layer

As the final layer in the Layered Tetrad, the cultural layer is the

furthest from the designer’s hand, yet it is still critical to a holistic

understanding of game design and the implications of game

development.

This chapter explores the cultural layer, the space where the player

and society take control of the game and make it their own.

Beyond Play

The inscribed and dynamic layers are obvious to all game designers, as they are

both integral to the concept of interactive experiences. The cultural layer,

however, is a little less obvious. As I define it, the cultural layer exists at the

intersection of the game and society. Players of a game become a community

united by their shared experience of play, and that community takes the

concepts and intellectual property of the game out into the world. The cultural

layer of the game is seen from one side by the community of players who have

intimate knowledge of the game and from the other by the members of general

society, who have no knowledge of the game at all and first encounter it not

through play but through the artifacts created by this community of players (see

Figure 6.1).

Figure 6.1 The cultural layer, created by the community of game players and

witnessed by society

As Constance Steinkuehler points out in her paper, “The Mangle of Play,”

the

dynamic play of a game—particularly a massively multiplayer game—is an

“interactively stabilized mangle of practice.” In saying so, she concurs with the

preceding chapter in stating that the dynamic layer of a game is composed not

only of the intents of the game developers but also of the intents of the players,

and the overall responsibility for and control over the experience is shared

between players and developers. Extending this concept, the cultural layer is

the layer in which players (and society in general) have more control and

agency than the original developers. Some examples of the cultural layer

include:

1 Constance Steinkuehler. “The Mangle of Play.” Games and Culture 1, no. 3 (2006): 199–213.

Player communities actually changing the inscribed elements of the

game through game mods (that is, modifications to the game through

software that changes the inscribed game elements)

Player communities seizing ownership of the game narrative by

writing their own fan fiction

Players and fans create their own game-related aesthetics through fan

art and music

Unlike the inscribed layer, where the four elements (mechanics, aesthetics,

narrative, and technology) are distinctly assigned to different members of the

development team, there is much more overlap and fuzziness of borders

between elements as they exist in the cultural layer. Fan-made game mods—

which feature prominently in the cultural layer—are often combinations of all

four elements with the responsibility for each element within the mod often

shared by the players and communities who make them.

I definitely do not mean to disparage the developers of game mods by continuing to refer to them

throughout this chapter as players. By doing so, I am only attempting to be clear so that there is no

confusion between the developers (i.e., developers of the inscribed content) and players (i.e., those who

played the game and who may develop game mods). Many fantastic game designers and developers

have started by making game mods, and doing so is a fantastic way to practice the craft.

In the sections that follow, the four elemental divisions are maintained to

provide consistency with the preceding chapters and to encourage you to look

at the examples listed through the lens of that particular element. However,

many of the examples listed under one cultural element could also have been

listed under another.

Cultural Mechanics

Cultural mechanics occur when players take the mechanics of the game into

their own hands, sometimes even crafting a new experience out of the game.

The most common examples of this include the following:

Game mods:

Players repurpose the game to accommodate their own

mechanics. This is most extensive in games for Windows-based personal

computers. Players modded Quake 2 by Id to make dozens if not

hundreds of new games that all used the technology of Quake 2 but

replaced the mechanics with gameplay and levels of their own (often

also replacing the aesthetics and dramatics).

Several fantastic game mods have become commercial products in their

own right. Counter Strike started as a mod for Half-Life and was

subsequently purchased by Valve, the Half-Life developers.3 Similarly,

Defense of the Ancients (DotA) started as a fan mod for Blizzard’s game

Warcraft III and eventually popularized the entire genre of multi-user

online battle arenas (MOBAs).

3 http://www.ign.com/articles/2000/11/23/counter-strike-2 and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counter-

Strike

According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiplayer_online_battle_arena and

https://myyouplay.wordpress.com/2016/12/05/dota-2-a-history-lesson/, DotA was actually a Warcraft

III remake of a mod for Starcraft known as Aeon of Strife — accessed October 15, 2021.

In addition, many companies have released editors for their games that

encourage and allow players to create custom content for the game. For

example, Bethesda Softworks has released Creation Kit™ for their game

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Creation Kit allows players to create their

own levels, quests, NPCs (non-player characters), and so forth. Bethesda

has done this before for other games, including Fallout 3 and earlier

games in the Elder Scrolls series.

Custom game levels:

Even without changing the other mechanics,

some games accommodate player-made levels. In fact, some games rely

on players to make levels for the game. Little Big Planet by Media

Molecule and Sound Shapes by Queasy Games both include simple

level-editor tools and expect some of their players to create levels for the

game. Both games include systems for players to distribute the levels

they’ve created and to rate levels created by other players. The game

editors and mod creation kits like those released for Skyrim and Fallout

3 also include level editors, and the level editing community for Epic’s

first-person shooter Unreal is one of the broadest and most mature in

modern gaming.

The major aspect that differentiates cultural mechanics like game mods from

house rules (a dynamic mechanic) is whether the inscribed mechanics of the

game are actually changed. If the inscribed mechanics remain the same but

players choose to apply their own goals to the game (e.g., players choosing to

do a “speed run” and finish the game as quickly as possible or attempting to

play through a usually violent game like Skyrim without directly killing any

enemies), that behavior still fits within the realm of dynamic mechanics. In

examples like those in Monopoly from the previous chapter (i.e., removing the

unpurchased property auction and collecting money on Free Parking), it’s a bit

of a gray line because the players are modifying the inscribed rules of the

game; however, I still consider that to be more within the dynamic layer than

the cultural layer because the number of rules changed is so low. It is when

players take control from the designers by making significant modifications to

the inscribed elements of the game that the behavior really moves into the

cultural layer.

Cultural Aesthetics

Cultural aesthetics occur when the community of players creates their own

aesthetics that relate to the game. This is often in the form of their own

versions of the character art, music, or other aesthetics of the game, but it also

can take the form of the community using the game engine to achieve their

own aesthetic purposes:

Fan art:

Many artists take games and game characters as inspiration

for their work and create new art that depicts those characters.

Cosplay:

Similar to fan art, cosplay (a portmanteau of costume and

play) is the practice of a fan of a game (or comic, anime, manga, or film)

dressing up as one of the characters from the game. The cosplayer takes

on the role and personality of the game character in the real world, just

as they did in the virtual world of the game. Cosplay is most commonly

seen at fan conventions for games, anime, and comics.

Machinema:

Though this is covered more fully in the “Cultural

Narrative” section, machinima—the practice of game players using a

game as an engine to create animated movies—is an excellent example

of players repurposing the aesthetics of the game for their own purposes.

Gameplay as art:

As was mentioned in an earlier chapter, in Keith

Burgun’s book Game Design Theory, he proposes that some game

developers should be seen in much the same way as those who make

musical instruments: artisans who craft tools that performers can use to

make art. According to him, there is an art not only to crafting games but

also to gameplay itself, and the elegance with which some highly skilled

players can play a game should be regarded as an aesthetic in and of

itself. Games with broad vocabularies of movement or player actions can

evoke this kind of artistic play. Examples include complex fighting

games like Street Fighter and creative traversal games like Tony Hawk’s

Pro Skater.

The free-to-play game Warframe by Digital Extremes combines both

these methods of artistic gameplay (creative traversal of space and the

utilization of many different kinds of moves to create your own play

style) with a third kind of gameplay art: the creation of a unique play

style through the flexible construction of an in-game character’s

abilities. This third style is very similar to the creative outcomes of

multiclassing in Dungeons & Dragons games (especially 3.5 Edition)

that allows players to build a character that fit their desired play style,

though in Warframe, the myriad customization options make the

possibilities for character construction incredibly broad.

Cultural Narrative

Sometimes, the community of players of a game will use the game or the world

of the game to tell their own stories and create their own narratives. With pen-

and-paper roleplaying games such as Dungeons & Dragons, this is a necessary

part of the dynamics of play. However, there are also examples of players

doing this far outside of the standard or expected dynamics of gameplay:

Fan fiction:

Just as with film, television, or any other form of

narrative media, some fans of games will write their own stories about

the game’s characters or world.

Narrative game mods:

Some games, such as Skyrim, Fallout, and

Neverwinter Nights, allow the players to use authorized tools to create

their own interactive narratives within the game world. This allows

players to tell their own stories with the game’s characters, and because

they are built with tools similar to those used by the game developers,

these stories can have the same depth and branching as the narratives

originally inscribed in the game.

One particularly inspiring narrative game mod was just a simple change

made by Mike Hoye, a father and fan of The Legend of Zelda: The

Windwaker. Hoye had been playing the game with his daughter, Maya,

and she absolutely loved it, but he was bothered by the game constantly

referring to Link (as played by Maya) as a boy. Mike hacked the game to

create a version that referred to Link as a girl. In Hoye’s words, “As you

might imagine, I’m not having my daughter growing up thinking girls

don’t get to be the hero and rescue their little brothers.” This small

change by a player of the game allowed his daughter to feel empowered

as the hero of the story in a way she didn’t when she was playing the

original, boy-focused game.

5 You can read Mike Hoye’s original blog post about this and download the custom patch that he made

at http://exple.tive.org/blarg/2012/11/07/flip-all-the-pronouns/ — accessed July 21, 2021.

Machinima: Another interesting example of narrative in the cultural

layer is machinima, which are linear videos made by capturing in-game

footage. One of the most famous of these is Red vs. Blue (RvB), a

comedy series by Rooster Teeth Productions that takes place entirely

within the world of Bungie’s first-person shooter, Halo. In its original

incarnation, the videos were all asymmetrically letterboxed with a thin

bar at the top and a thick black bar at the bottom. The bottom bar was

there to cover the gun that would have been in the scene because the

creators of Red vs. Blue originally used footage exactly as seen by

players in the game. In those early videos, you can still see the aiming

reticle of the gun.

Red vs. Blue began in April 2003 and has become much more successful

and polished over the years, eventually even receiving direct support

from the Bungie team. In the original version of Halo a character’s head

looked down as they aimed down, but then popped up to looking straight

forward when the character’s gun was aimed all the way down. This was

used by Rooster Teeth to make it look like the characters were nodding

their heads while talking (without their guns pointing at each other).

Then, in Halo 2, Bungie enabled a non-aiming posture for characters to

make machinima like RvB easier to make.

Other game engines have also embraced machinima. Quake was one of

the earliest heavily used machinima engines. Uncharted 2: Drake’s

Deception by Naughty Dog had a multiplayer online Machinima Mode

that encouraged players to make machinima with the game engine and

enabled several changes to camera angles, animation, and more.

Cultural Technology

As mentioned earlier in this chapter, a lot of fuzziness exists among the four

elements in the cultural layer, and therefore, most of the examples of cultural

technology have already been listed under the other three elements (e.g., game

mods, which are listed under cultural mechanics but also require technology for

their implementation). As with the other three elements, the core of cultural

technology is twofold; it covers both the effect that the game technology has on

the lives of players when they are not actively playing and the technology that

player communities develop to alter the inscribed technology in the game or

the dynamic game experience:

Game technology used outside of games:

Over the past few decades,

game technology has expanded by leaps and bounds. The increasing

resolution of displays (e.g., the transition of television from 480i to

1080p and 4K) and the appetite of players for progressively better-

looking games have driven developers to constantly improve their

techniques for rendering high-quality graphics quickly. These real-time

techniques, developed for games, have found their way into everything

from medical imaging to previsualization of films (the practice of using

game-like animations and real-time graphics to carefully plan

complicated shots). Similarly, the massively parallel processing power of

graphics cards created to improve game visuals and frame rates is now

being repurposed for everything from Bitcoin mining to machine

learning in artificial intelligence.

Player-made external tools:

External tools, created by players, that

can change a player’s game experience but don’t count as game mods

(because they don’t alter any of the inscribed mechanics of the game) are

part of the technical layer. Examples include the following:

Map applications for Minecraft that enable players to see a large-

area map of their game, giving them the ability to search for specific

geographic features or minerals

Damage per second (DPS) calculators for massively multiplayer

online games (MMOGs) like World of Warcraft that can help players

determine the best ways to level their characters and the best

equipment to obtain to do the most average damage per second of

combat

Any of several tools for the MMOG Eve Online that are available on

mobile devices, including tools to manage skill training, assets, in-

game mail, and so on

In Eve Online, skills are trained in real time regardless of whether the player is currently logged in; so,

having an alarm to tell the player that a skill is done, and she can now select a new one to train is very

useful (information from http://pozniak.pl/wp/?p=4882 and

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/neocom/id418895101 — both accessed July 22, 2021).

Fan-made game guides like those available at http://gamefaqs.com

that help players understand the game better and can improve a

player’s ability to play a game well but don’t actually modify the

inscribed game

Authorized Transmedia Are Not Part of the Cultural

Layer

The word transmedia refers to narrative or intellectual property that exists

across more than one medium. An excellent example of this is Pokémon, which

has been extremely successful as a television show, a card game, a series of

handheld games for portable Nintendo consoles and mobile phones, and a

manga series since its creation in 1996. There are many other examples of this,

including the video games made to accompany the release of nearly every new

Disney film and the movies that have been made from famous games, such as

Resident Evil and Tomb Raider.

Transmedia can be an important part of the brand of a game and can be a

strategy to increase the market penetration and duration of that brand.

However, it’s important to draw a distinction between authorized transmedia

(like the Pokémon example) and unauthorized fan-made transmedia. The latter

belongs in the cultural layer, but the former does not (see Figure 6.2).

Figure 6.2 The location of authorized transmedia relative to the Layered

Tetrad

The inscribed, dynamic, and cultural layers of the Layered Tetrad are separated

based on the progression from the elements inscribed by the game’s creators

through the dynamic play of the game by players and out to the cultural impact

that playing the game has on both players and society. In contrast, authorized

transmedia are the re-inscribing of the game’s brand into something else by the

intellectual property (IP) owners of that brand. This places authorized

transmedia firmly on the inscribed layer, just as a new game in the same series

would be. Each individual transmedia property is another product on the

inscribed layer that has the possibility of its own dynamic and cultural layers.

The important distinction is one of who has control. In both the inscribed layer

of a game and an authorized transmedia companion product to a game, the

control is held by the company that develops the game. When the game moves

into the dynamic layer, the control is shared between technologies and

mechanics put in place by the developers and the actual actions, procedures,

strategies, and such executed by the players. In the cultural layer, the control

has shifted almost completely from the developers of the game to the

community of players of the game. For this reason, fan fiction, cosplay, game

mods, and fan-made transmedia all belong in the cultural layer, but authorized

transmedia products do not.

To learn more about transmedia, I recommend reading Professor Henry

Jenkins’ books and papers on the topic.

The Cultural Impact of a Game

So far, we’ve looked at the cultural layer as the way in which players take

ownership of a game and move it out into culture at large. Another very

different way of looking at this is to consider the impact that gameplay has on

players. Over the past several decades, the game industry has been quick to

acknowledge and promote psychological studies that found evidence of the

positive effects of game playing (e.g., improved multitasking skills, improved

situational awareness), while simultaneously playing down studies that found

evidence of the negative impact of gaming (e.g., addiction to games and the

much-publicized—though largely disproven—negative effects of violence in

video games).

In the case of violent video games in particular, it’s probable

that this downplaying was largely defensive. Nearly every company that

belongs to the Entertainment Software Association (the lobbying group for

video game companies) has made games where the core mechanic is some type

of violence, and it seems that “violent video games” are a common culprit that

journalists tend to blame when people commit horrible acts.

However, in

2011, the landscape for this discussion changed in a critical way when the

Supreme Court of the United States decided in Edmund G. Brown, Jr.,

Governor of California, et al., Petitioners v. Entertainment Merchants

Association et al., 564 U.S. (2011), that games are art and are therefore

protected by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. Up to this

point, members of the ESA and other game developers had good reason to fear

government action to ban violent games. Now, just like most other forms of

media, games are protected as art, and developers can make games about

whatever they want without fear of government bans.

7 Even a cursory perusal of the Entertainment Software Association’s (ESA’s) archive of noteworthy

news (at https://www.theesa.com/policy/screen-time/ and https://www.theesa.com/policy/violence/ —

both accessed July 22, 2021) reveals a plethora of articles about the positive benefits of gameplay and

almost none about the potential negative effects.

Dave Moore and Bill Manville. “What role might video game addiction have played in the Columbine

shootings?” New York Daily News, April 23, 2009

Kevin Simpson and Jason Blevins. “Did Harris preview massacre on Doom?” Denver Post, May 4,

1999.

Manipulative Game Design

Of course, with this liberty also comes a responsibility to acknowledge the

effects that the games we make have upon society. In the 2011 class-action suit

Meguerian v. Apple Inc.,9 Apple paid more than $100 million in settlement

because games developed by third-party companies and approved by Apple

had been designed with mechanics that encouraged children to pay hundreds of

dollars for in-app purchases as part of gameplay. Though Apple settled the suit

and thereby avoided a judgment, the complaint was that the games had been

designed to prey on children’s underdeveloped understanding of real money,

and some children had paid more than $1,000 in less than a month without

their parents’ knowledge or approval. A recent survey also shows that more

than half of gamers worldwide have missed sleep because of gaming, and

about one-third of gamers play while at work, with 11 percent of gamers

playing at work every day.

Some very popular games are designed with

manipulative game mechanics such as “loot boxes” (randomized rewards for

play that some equate to gambling) or “energy” and “spoilage” (mechanics that

encourage players to return to the game every fifteen minutes). Manipulative

game mechanics like these are built on known methods of influencing

behavior. To understand more about these techniques of manipulation, you can

read Robert Cialdini’s books on the manipulative methods used by

advertisers.

9 Meguerian v. Apple Inc., case number 5:11-cv-01758, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern

District of California.

10 https://www.limelight.com/resources/white-paper/state-of-online-gaming-2020/ — accessed July 22,

2021.

11 One of which is: Robert B. Cialdini. Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. (New York: Morrow,

1993).

The Messages that Our Games—and Fans—Send

The first time that anything related to video games was on the front page of the

New York Times was an article on October 15, 2014 titled, “Feminist Critics of

Video Games Facing Threats in ‘GamerGate’ Campaign.”12 GamerGate was a

small, very vocal, misogynistic movement that purported concern for ethics in

video game journalism but in practice was a gathering place for men who

feared that games were falling under the control of women, liberals, and others

they dubbed “social justice warriors.”

12 The article can be found here: http://nyti.ms/1wHspJH — accessed July 22, 2021.

The article was written in response to the cancellation of an appearance by

feminist cultural critic, Anita Sarkeesian, at Utah State University. Leading up

to the cancellation, Sarkeesian had bravely withstood both death and rape

threats for months in response to her Feminist Frequency YouTube series of

insightful analyses of the latent misogyny that has pervaded many games over

the past decades. However, in this instance, someone threatened a mass

shooting at her talk, and USU refused to ban weapons at the talk, so she

canceled.

Please note that Utah State is a different school from the University of Utah. University of Utah has

an excellent game design graduate program called Entertainment Arts and Engineering that is

consistently ranked in the top 10.

Let me be very clear, GamerGate was the wolf of misogyny dressed in the

sheep’s clothing of complaints about ethics in video game journalism. I spoke

with many game developers about GamerGate, and the overwhelming majority

of them were deeply disturbed by the hatred that GamerGate stood for.

However, as the game development community, I believe that we must own the

fact that through our actions, we created GamerGate.

By objectifying women

in games and game advertisements—and by presenting straight, white men as

heroes and women as objects to be rescued and trophies to be won—we created

an audience who believed that this was true and felt threatened when people

like Sarkeesian pointed this out. In the game Super Mario Odyssey for the

Nintendo Switch, Mario walks around a realistic New York City and converses

with talking forks, but after more than 30 years of the Mario franchise, the core

plot of the game is still that of him fighting Bowser to save an entirely passive

Princess Peach whose only role in the entire series has been to be kidnapped

and serve as a prize for Mario to win.

This has been slowly improving in

commercial games, but it is still a real problem.

Since the publication of the second edition, reporters have found that the creation of GamerGate was

also due to a concerted effort by Steve Bannon, who profited off of both the proliferation of GamerGate

and the intentional creation of the misogynistic alt-right movement in the United States. Reference:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/01/gamergate-alt-right-hate-trump – accessed July

22, 2021.

Princess Peach was an active player character in the U.S. release of Super Mario Bros. 2 for the

NES; however, that game was just a reskinned and improved version of the Japanese game Yume Kōjō:

Doki Doki Panic (Dream Factory: Heart-Pounding Panic, also designed by Shigeru Miyamoto), and

not a true Super Mario game. Peach has also been an active player character in many of the Mario

offshoot games (e.g., Mario Kart, Mario Party, Mario Tennis), but she is still treated as an object in all

of the core Mario games. Reference: http://www.ign.com/articles/2010/09/14/ign-presents-the-history-

of-super-mario-bros — accessed July 22, 2021.

Additionally, I believe that we need to be careful of the messages embedded in

the mechanics of our games. Minecraft—a truly excellent game that

encourages creativity and exploration—also includes the embedded concept

that the entire world is simply a mine of resources to be consumed by the

players. 2b2t.org is one of the oldest existing continually running multiplayer

Minecraft servers, and entering into the world for the first time, players find

themselves in a barren hellscape completely devoid of any resources. All the

resources in the world have been consumed for kilometers in any direction, and

what is left is an empty husk of stone bridges left behind, floating in the air, on

which players can walk for hours to reach parts of the game where resources

remain. One seasoned player stated, “The million [brick] mark…that’s where

all the cool stuff is.”

At standard walking speed of about 5m/s, it would take

a player more than 2.3 real-time days of walking (about 166 Minecraft days) to

travel the 1,000 kilometers necessary to reach that million brick mark (and

that’s assuming there were no obstacles, gaps, traps, or other players trying to

kill you along the way). Though the world of 2b2t.org is certainly an unusual

experience in Minecraft, it is also an ultimate expression of the core mechanic

of the game: that of mining the earth to take what you want and create what

you wish with no regard for what you leave behind.

16 http://www.newsweek.com/2016/09/23/minecraft-anarchy-server-2b2t-will-kill-you-498946.html —

accessed July 22, 2021.

Like all forms of media, games have impact, and they contribute to the actions

and world views of those who play them. Games absolutely aren’t going to

cause someone to choose to perpetrate a mass shooting, but many games do

normalize violence, and they’re not alone. In most police procedural television

shows, police officers are shown using their guns on a nearly daily basis. To

contrast that with reality, only 1 out of 850 officers in New York City fired a

weapon at a suspect in 2013; that’s an average of a 0.00032 percent chance of

an individual officer firing a weapon at a suspect on any given day (or

1/310,250).

17 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/how-dangerous-is-police-w_b_6373798 — accessed July 22, 2021.

I believe that we as designers and media creators have a responsibility for the

games that we make and the messages that they send into the world. Just as

game mechanics can normalize consumption or violence, by the same token,

they can also promote pro-social or pro-ecological behavior. A version of

Minecraft could be made with a much smaller world size that required things

like crop rotation and responsible use of limited water resources to sustain the

world and feed the players on a server. A social network game could be created

where the resources a player owned would spoil over time and players would

gain points for giving those resources to others in need, perhaps in trade for

other resources that they couldn’t acquire on their own. If pervasive in games

and other media, mechanics like these could normalize sustainable practices

and altruism.

Summary

The inscribed and dynamic layers of the Layered Tetrad have been discussed in

several books prior to this one, but the cultural layer has received far less

attention. In fact, even in my personal practice as a game designer and game

design professor, though I think very concretely about the inscribed and

dynamic layers on a daily basis, I spend much less time than I should

considering the cultural impact of my work and the changes that players might

make to my games.

Covering game design ethics in meaningful detail is largely beyond the scope

of this book, but it is important that designers think about the consequences of

the games they create, particularly because after a player has finished playing a

game and set it aside, the cultural layer is all that remains.

Chapter 7. Acting Like a Designer

Now that you’ve learned something about how to take a designer’s

approach to thinking about and analyzing games, it’s time to look at

the way that game designers go about crafting interactive experiences.

As mentioned in previous chapters, game design is a practice, and

therefore, the more design you do, the better you will get at it.

However, you also need to make sure that you’re starting with the

kinds of effective practices that will yield you the greatest gains over

time. That is the purpose of this chapter.

Iterative Design

“Game design is 1% inspiration and 99% iteration.” —Chris Swain

Remember this saying from the first chapter? In this section, we explore it

further.

The number one key to good design—in fact, the most important thing that you

can learn from this book—is the process of iterative design shown in Figure

7.1.

I have seen iterative design take some games that were initially terrible and

make them great, and I’ve seen it at work across all forms of design from

furniture to illustration to game design.

Figure 7.1

The iterative process of design

Based on Tracy Fullerton, Christopher Swain, and Steven Hoffman, Game Design Workshop: A

Playcentric Approach to Creating Innovative Games (Burlington, MA: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers,

2008), 36.

The four phases of the iterative process of design are

Analysis:

The analysis phase is all about understanding where you are

and what you want to accomplish. You must clearly understand the

problem that you’re trying to solve (or opportunity that you’re trying to

take advantage of). You must also understand the resources that you can

bring to bear on the project and the amount of time you have in which to

implement your design (reality checks that are not critical when you

begin the process but become increasingly important with each

iteration).

Design:

Now that you have a clear idea where you are and what you’re

trying to accomplish with your design, create a design that will solve the

problem/opportunity with the resources you have available to you. This

phase starts with brainstorming and ends with a concrete plan for

implementation.

Implementation: You have the design in hand; now execute it. As

mentioned in Chapter 5, “The Dynamic Layer,” a game is not a game

until people are playing it. The implementation phase is about getting

from game design idea to playable prototype as quickly as possible. As

you’ll see in the digital game tutorials of Part II of this book, the earliest

implementations are sometimes just moving a character around the

screen—with no enemies or objectives—and seeing whether the

movement feels responsive and natural. Implementing just a small part

of the game before testing is often the right thing to do. A test of just a

portion of the game can often be more focused than a large-scale

implementation could be. At the end of implementation, you’re ready to

run a playtest.

Testing:

Put people in front of your game and get their reactions. As

your experience as a designer grows, you will get better at knowing how

the various game mechanics you design will play out when the game is

being tested, but even with years of experience, you will never know for

sure. Testing will tell you. You always need to test early, when it is still

possible to make changes to the game and get it on the right track.

Testing must also be done very frequently so that you can best

understand the causes of the changes in player feedback that you

witness. In nearly two decades of teaching students, I have often wished

that I made them playtest earlier, and I have never once wished that we

had waited longer to playtest.

When you have finished the testing phase, you move into analysis again to

analyze and understand the results of the playtest. This leads you into the next

iteration of design, and so on, over and over, getting closer to a finished game

with each iteration. But, before we talk more about this iteration, let’s look at

each phase in more detail.

Analysis

Every design seeks to solve a problem or take advantage of an opportunity, and

before you can start to design, you need to have a clear idea of what that

problem or opportunity is. You may be saying to yourself, “I just want to make

a great game,” which is true of most of us, but even with that as your initial

statement, you can dig deeper and analyze your problem further.

To start, try asking yourself these questions:

For whom am I designing the game?

Knowledge of your target

audience can dictate many other elements of design. If you’re creating a

game for children, it is more likely that their parents would let them use a

mobile device than a full computer. If you’re designing a game for people

who like strategy games, they will most likely be used to playing on a

PC. If you’re designing a game for men, you should be aware that about

8 percent of men are colorblind.

Color vision deficiency has a prevalence of 8% for men and 0.4% for women and is more common

among men with European ancestry. https://apfmj.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12930-014-

0010-3 — accessed July 24, 2021.

One thing that you should always be aware of is the danger of designing

a game for yourself. If you just make a game for you, there’s a legitimate

possibility that only you will want to play it. Researching your intended

audience and understanding what makes them tick can tell you a

tremendous amount about where your game design should go and help

you to make your game better.

You must also realize that what players think they want and what they

will actually enjoy are sometimes two different things. In your research,

it is important to differentiate between your audience’s stated desires and

the things that actually motivate and engage them.

What are my resources?

Most of us don’t have a budget of tens of

millions of dollars with which to employ a studio of 200 people to make

a game over the span of two years. But you probably do have some time

and talent and maybe even a group of talented friends as well. Being

honest with yourself about your resources, strengths, and weaknesses can

help shape your design. As an independent developer, your primary

resources are talent and time. Money can help you purchase either of

these through hiring contractors or purchasing assets, but especially if

you’re working on a small indie game team, you want to make sure that

the game you’re developing makes the best use of the resources on your

team. When working on a game, you should treat your time and that of

your team members as a precious resource; be sure not to waste it.

What prior art exists?

This is the single question that is most often

ignored by my students (often to their detriment). Prior art is the term

used to describe existing games and other media that are related to yours

in some way. No game comes from a vacuum, and as a designer, it is up

to you to know not only the other games that have inspired you (which,

of course, you know), but also what other games exist in the same space

that came before or after your primary inspirations.

For instance, if you were to design a first-person shooter for console, of

course you would look at Destiny, Doom, Titanfall, and the Call of Duty:

Modern Warfare series, but you would also need to be familiar with Halo

(the first game that made first-person shooter (FPS) work on a console

when conventional wisdom held that it was impossible to do so),

Marathon (Bungie’s game prior to Halo, which forms the basis for a lot

of the design decisions and mythology in Halo), and the other FPSs that

were precursors for Marathon.

Prior art research is necessary because you must understand everything

you can about the ways that other people have tried to approach the

design problem that you’re tackling. Even if someone else had the exact

same idea as you, they almost certainly approached it in a different way,

and understanding both their successes and failures will equip you to

make your game better.

What is the fastest path to a playable game that demonstrates what

I want to test?

Though often overlooked, this question is critical for

obvious reasons. You only have 24 hours available to you each day, and if

you’re at all like me, only a small fraction of them can be devoted to

game development. Knowing this, it is critical that your time is used as

efficiently as possible if you want to get your game made. Think about

the core mechanic of the game you want to create—the thing that the

player does most throughout the game (for example, in Super Mario

Bros., the core mechanic is jumping)—and make sure that you design and

test that first. From that, you’ll know whether making more of the game

is worth it. Art, music, and all other aesthetic elements are certainly

important to your final game, but at this point, you must focus on the

mechanics—on gameplay—and get that working first. That is your goal

as a game designer.

Of course, you’ll have many more questions of your own to add to these, but

regardless of the game you’re making, these four are critical to keep in mind

during the analysis phase.

Design

Now that you have framed the parameters of your project in the analysis phase,

it’s time to decide what you’re going to make. Because this is an iterative

process, you have two very different questions to answer:

What will the final product be?

What is the most important thing to make in this iteration?

The “Brainstorming and Ideation” section later in this chapter is all about a

method I have found useful in answering the first question, and, of course,

everyone loves thinking about the great end result of the entire development

process, but before you can move into the implementation phase, you must also

answer the second question, or you risk being stuck in implementation forever

and never actually testing anything.

The amount of time you spend talking about each question will shift as you

iterate more and more. On your first pass, you’ll often spend a lot of time in

brainstorming with your team just trying to figure out the basics of what you

want to make. You’ll have lots of ideas—some general, and some about

specific mechanics or experiences you want your players to have—and in this

first iteration, you want to capture all of them. Then, you’ll move on to

question #2 and will make the difficult decision of what the most critical and

reasonable thing is that you could implement first. As you move on and iterate

more, the brainstorming you do will get shorter, and the new ideas you add to

the game will get fewer because each iteration, you’ll be much closer to your

finished game. However, as you move on into more and more iterations, the

question of what to implement next and what to drop from the game will get

much more important and will possibly take much more time for the team to

decide.

Speaking of making decisions as a team, there’s another aspect of design that I

think it’s very important for you to understand now: Design isn’t about getting

your way, it’s not about being a great genius or auteur who is followed by

everyone else on the team, and it’s not even about doing a great job of

communicating your vision to the rest of the team.

Design isn’t about you; it is about the project.

Working as a game designer is about collaborating with the rest of the team,

compromising, and above all listening.

In the first few pages of his book The Art of Game Design, Jesse Schell states

that listening is the most important skill that a game designer can have, and I

emphatically agree. Schell lists five kinds of listening that you need to

develop:

Jesse Schell, The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses (Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2008), 4–6.

Listen to your audience:

Whom do you want to play your game?

Whom do you want to buy your game? As mentioned earlier, these are

questions that you must answer, and after you have answered them, you

need to listen to the kinds of experiences that your audience wants to

have. The whole purpose of the iterative process of design is to make

something, throw it out to playtesters, and get their feedback. Make sure

you’re listening to that feedback when they give it, even (especially!) if

it’s not what you expected or what you want to hear.

Listen to your team:

On most game projects, you’ll be working with a

team of other talented people. Your job as the designer is to listen to all

of their thoughts and ideas and work with them to unearth the ideas that

will create the best game for your audience. If you surround yourself

with people who are willing to speak up when they disagree with you,

you will have a better game. Your team should not be contentious;

rather, it should be a team of creative individuals who all care

passionately about the game.

Listen to your client:

A lot of the time, as a professional game

designer, you’ll be working for a client (boss, committee, etc.), and

you’re going to need to listen to their input. They aren’t usually going to

be expert game designers—that’s why they hired you—but they will

have specific needs that you must meet. At the end of the day, it will be

your job to listen to them at several levels: what they tell you they want,

what they think they want but don’t say out loud, and even what they

really want deep down but might not even admit to themselves. With

clients, you need to listen very carefully to leave them with not only an

excellent game but also an excellent impression of working with you.

Listen to your game:

Sometimes certain elements of a game design fit

together like a hand in a glove, and sometimes, the fit is more like a

wolverine in a Christmas stocking (p.s.: bad idea). As the designer,

you’ll be the team member closest to the gameplay, and understanding

the game from a gestalt (i.e., holistic) perspective will be up to you.

Even if a certain aspect of a game is brilliant design, it might not fit well

with the rest. Don’t worry; if it is a great bit of design, there’s a good

chance you can find a place for it in another game. You’ll have lots of

chances across the many games you’ll make in your career.

Listen to yourself: Several important aspects of listening to yourself

include:

Listen to your gut:

Sometimes you’ll get a gut feeling about

something, and sometimes these will be wrong, but other times they’ll

be very right. When your gut tells you something about a design, give

it a try. Some part of your mind may have figured out the answer

before your conscious mind had a chance to.

Listen to your health:

Take care of yourself and stay healthy.

Seriously. A tremendous amount of research out there shows that

pulling all-nighters, being stressed, and not exercising have a real and

tremendously negative effect on your ability to do creative work. To

be the best designer you can be, you need to be healthy and well

rested. Don’t let yourself get caught in a cycle of one crisis after

another that you try to solve by working crazy hours into the night.

Listen to how you sound to other people:

When you say things to

your colleagues, peers, friends, family, and acquaintances, take a

moment every once in a while to really listen to how you sound. I

don’t want you to get a complex about it or anything, but I do want

you to listen to yourself and ask these questions:

Do I sound respectful?

Do I sound like I care about the other person?

Do I sound like I care about the project?

All other things being equal, the people who do best in life are those

who consistently demonstrate respect and care for others. I’ve known

some really talented people who didn’t get this; they did all right

initially, but without fail, their careers sputtered and failed as fewer

and fewer people wanted to work with them. Game design is a

community of shared respect.

There are, of course, many more aspects to acting like a professional designer

than just listening, but Schell and I agree that it is one of the most important.

The rest of this book covers more nuts-and-bolts aspects of being a designer,

but you must approach all of it with a humble, healthy, collaborative, and

creative attitude.

Implementation

The latter two-thirds of this book are about digital implementation, but it’s

important to realize that the key to effective implementation in the process of

iterative design is to get from design to playtest in the most efficient way

possible. If you’re testing the jump of a character in a platform game such as

Super Mario Bros. or Mega Man, you will need to make a digital prototype.

However, if you’re testing a graphical user interface (GUI) menu system, you

don’t need to build a fully working digital version; it’s perfectly fine to make a

paper prototype by printing out images of the various states of the menu and

then asking testers to navigate through them with you acting as the computer

(and swapping the printed images by hand).

A paper prototype can enable you to quickly test ideas and generate feedback

in several ways. They usually take drastically less time to implement than

digital prototypes and can give you the unique ability to change the game rules

in the middle of a play session if the initial rules aren’t working. Chapter 9,

“Paper Prototyping,” includes in-depth information about paper prototyping

techniques and both good and bad uses for paper prototypes.

Another important way that you can shorten your implementation time is to

realize that you don’t have to do everything yourself. Many of my new students

approach game development with a desire to learn it all: They want to design

the game; write all the code; model, texture, rig, and animate game characters;

build environments; write the story; create game code; and sometimes even

want to write their own game engine. If you were a multimillion-dollar studio

with years of time, this might be an okay idea, but as an independent designer,

it’s ludicrous. Even indie developers like Notch (the creator of Minecraft), who

are often seen as solitary geniuses, have stood on the shoulders of many giants.

Minecraft was inspired by several other games, especially Infiniminer, which

had just been made open source when Notch began working on Minecraft.

you wanted to make a computer game, you could start by building a computer

from individual transistors, but that would be ludicrous. It’s nearly as

ridiculous to think that you would want to write your own game engine. I chose

Unity as the game engine for this book because more than 3,000 people are

working at Unity Technologies every day to make our job as game developers

easier. By trusting them to do their job well, I enable myself to focus on the

interesting work of game design and development that I would much rather do

than write my own game engine.

4 https://www.wired.com/2013/11/minecraft-book/ by Daniel Goldberg and Linus Larsson — accessed

July 23, 2021.

If you do really want to write your own game engine, Jason Gregory has recently updated his fantastic

book on the subject: Jason Gregory, Game Engine Architecture, 3rd Edition (Boca Raton, FL: CRC

Press 2019).

Similarly, the Unity Asset Store is a fantastic place to trade a little money for a

lot of time. The Asset Store enables you to purchase thousands of time-saving

assets, including models, animations, and code libraries for everything from

controller input

to better text rendering,

to gorgeous physically based

rendering libraries and visually scripted shader creation.

In fact, if you look at

the footnotes, you’ll see that nearly all of these things I listed have now been

incorporated into the latest versions of Unity, demonstrating not only Unity’s

commitment to improvement but also their willingness to use the Asset Store

as a way to determine what improvements are most important to game

developers.

6 For controller input, I recommend InControl by Gallant Games or Rewired by Guavaman Enterprises.

Unity released its own new Input System in 2020, and it is great for multiple controller input, but I still

use the old Unity input system for prototyping (and in this book). The old system is much faster to get

up and running.

Since the second edition of this book was published, Unity has incorporated the better text rendering

of the former Asset Store product TextMeshPro by Digital Native Studios into Unity (as a plug-in

package through the Package Manager).

8 Now Unity’s default shader incorporates physically based rendering, and Unity has created its own

Shader Graph (which mimics the ability to use visual scripting to create shaders) that was first

introduced to the Asset Store by Tim Cooper’s Strumpy Shader Editor in 2010 and Freya Holmér’s

Shader Forge in 2013.

The Asset Store also includes several free assets that you can easily use as

placeholders in your prototypes. Any time you’re thinking about taking the

time to write a robust, reusable piece of code for one of your prototypes, I

would recommend checking on the Asset Store to see whether someone else

has already done it for you. Kicking that person a few bucks could save you

dozens of hours of development time.

Testing

After you’ve gotten the barest minimum of a prototype working, it’s time to

test it. The key thing to keep in mind now is that regardless of what you think

about your game, you won’t really know anything until a player who is not you

has tested it and given you feedback. The more people who play your game,

the more accurate that feedback will be.

In my Game Design Workshop class at the University of Southern California,

each of our board game projects took place over four weeks of labs. In the first

lab, the students were placed in teams and given time to brainstorm their game

ideas. Every subsequent lab was devoted entirely to playtesting the latest

prototypes of their games. By the end of a four-week project, each student team

had completed nearly six hours of in-class playtesting and had drastically

improved their designs as a result. The best thing you can do for the game

you’re designing is to have people play it and give you feedback as often as

possible. And, for the sake of all that is good, please write down what your

playtesters tell you. If you forget what they said, the playtest is a waste.

It is also important to make sure that your playtesters are giving you honest

feedback. Sometimes, playtesters will give you overly positive feedback

because they don’t want to hurt your feelings. In The Art of Game Design,

Jesse Schell recommends telling your testers something like, “I need your help.

This game has some real problems, but we’re not sure what they are. Please, if

there is anything at all you don’t like about this game, it will be a great help to

me if you let me know”

to encourage them to be honest with you about flaws

they see in the game.

Jesse Schell, The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses (Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2008), 401.

Chapter 10, “Game Testing,” covers several different aspects of testing in much

more detail.

Iterate, Iterate, Iterate, Iterate, Iterate, Iterate,

Iterate!

After you have run your playtest, you should have a lot of feedback written

down from your testers. As mentioned earlier, it’s now time to analyze again.

What did the players like? What didn’t they like? Were there places in the

game that were overly easy or difficult? Was it interesting and engaging?

From all of these questions, you will be able to determine a new problem to

solve with your design. Take time to interpret and synthesize player feedback

(there is a sidebar in Chapter 10, “Game Testing,” about this). After doing so,

try to pick a specific, achievable design goal for your next iteration. For

instance, you might decide that you need to make the second half of the first

level more exciting, or you may decide to reduce the amount of randomness in

the game.

Each subsequent iteration of your game should include some changes, but

don’t try to change too many things or solve too many problems all at the same

time. The most important thing is to get to the next playtest quickly and

determine whether the solutions that you have implemented solved the

problems they were meant to solve.

Innovation

In his book The Medici Effect,

author Frans Johansson writes about two kinds

of innovation: incremental and intersectional.

10 Frans Johansson, The Medici Effect: What Elephants and Epidemics Can Teach Us about Innovation

(Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 2006).

Incremental innovation

is making something a little better in a

predictable way. The progressive improvement of Pentium processors by

Intel throughout the 1990s was incremental innovation; each year, a new

Pentium processor was released that was larger and had more transistors

than the previous generation. Incremental innovation is reliable and

predictable, and if you’re looking for investment capital, it’s easy to

convince investors that it will work. However, as its name would

suggest, incremental innovation can never make great leaps forward

precisely because it is exactly what everyone expects.

Intersectional innovation

occurs at the collision of two disparate

ideas, and it is where a lot of the greatest ideas can come from. However,

because the results of intersectional innovation are novel and often

unpredictable, convincing others of the merit of the ideas generated

through intersectional innovation is more difficult than with incremental

innovation.

In 1991, Richard Garfield was trying to find a publisher for his game

RoboRally. One of the people he approached was Peter Adkison, founder and

CEO of Wizards of the Coast. Though Adkison liked the game, he didn’t feel

that Wizards had enough resources to publish a game like RoboRally that had

so many different pieces, but he mentioned to Richard that they had been

looking for a new game that could be played with very little equipment and

resolve in 15 minutes.

Richard intersected this idea of a fast-play, low-equipment card game with

another idea that had been kicking around in his head for a while—that of

playing a card game with cards that were collected like baseball cards—and in

1993, Wizards of the Coast released Magic: The Gathering, which started the

entire genre of collectible card games (CCGs).

Though Garfield had been thinking about a card game that was collectible for a

little while before his meeting with Adkison, the intersection of that idea with

Adkison’s specific needs for a fast-play game is what gave birth to the

collectible card game genre, and nearly all CCGs that have come since have the

same basic formula: a basic rule set, cards with printed rules on them that

override the basic rules, deck construction, various rarity levels, and fast play.

The brainstorming procedure described next takes advantage of both kinds of

innovation to help you create better ideas.

Brainstorming and Ideation

The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas and throw out all

the bad ones.

—Linus Pauling, winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry and the Nobel

Peace Prize

Just like anyone else, not all of your ideas are going to be great ones, so the

best you can do is to generate a lot of ideas and then sift through them later to

find the good ones. This is the whole concept behind brainstorming. This

section covers a specific brainstorming process that I have seen work very well

for many people, especially in groups of creative individuals.

For this process, you will need:

A whiteboard

A stack of 3x5 note cards (or just a bunch of slips of paper)

A notebook for jotting down ideas

Various whiteboard markers, pens, pencils, and so on.

The process works best with 5 to 10 people, but I’ve modified it in the past to

work for a classroom of 65 students, and you can alter it to work for fewer

people by repeating tasks (for instance, if you’re by yourself, and it says that

each person should do something once, just do it yourself multiple times until

you’re satisfied).

Step 1: Expansion Phase

Let’s say that you are just starting a 48-hour game jam with a few friends. The

theme of the game jam is uroboros (the snake eating its own tail symbol that

was the theme of the Global Game Jam in 2012). Not much to go on, right? So,

you start with the kind of brainstorming that you learned in grade school. Draw

an uroboros in the middle of a white board, draw a circle around it, and start

free-associating. Don’t worry about what you’re writing at this point—don’t

censor anything—just write whatever comes to mind as you go. Figure 7.2

shows an example.

Figure 7.2 The expansion phase of brainstorming a game for uroboros

When you’re done, take a picture of the whiteboard. I have hundreds of

pictures of whiteboards in my phone, and I’ve never regretted taking one. After

you capture it, share it with everyone in the group via email or other means.

Step 2: Collection Phase

Collect all the nodes (the words in circles) of the brainstorming expansion

phase and write them each down on one 3x5 note card. These are called idea

cards (see Figure 7.3), and you’ll use them in the next phase.

Warning

BEWARE THE TYRANNY OF THE MARKER If you have

more people taking part in the brainstorm than you have

whiteboard markers, you should always be careful to make sure

that everyone is being heard. Creative people come in all types,

and the most introverted person on your team may have some of

the best ideas. If you’re managing a creative team, try to make sure

that the more introverted members of your team are the ones

holding the whiteboard markers. They may be willing to write

something on the board that they aren’t willing to say out loud.

Figure 7.3 Uroboros idea cards

A Quick Aside and a Bad Joke or Two

Let’s start with a bad joke:

There are two lithium atoms walking along, and one says to the

other, “Phil, I think I lost an electron back there.” So Phil says,

“Really Jason, are you sure?” And Jason replies, “Yeah, I’m

positive!”

Here’s another:

Why was six afraid of seven?

Because seven eight nine!

Sorry; I know. They’re terrible.

You may be wondering why I’m subjecting you to these bad jokes. I’m

doing so because jokes like these work on the same principle as

intersectional innovation. Humans are creatures that love to think and

combine weird ideas. Jokes are funny because they lead our minds

down one track and then throw a completely different concept into the

Step 3: Collision Phase

Here’s where the fun begins. Shuffle together all the idea cards and deal two to

each person in the group. Each person takes their two cards up to the

whiteboard and reveals them to everyone. Then the group collectively comes

up with three different game ideas inspired by the collision of the two cards. (If

the two cards are either too closely paired or just don’t work together at all, it’s

okay to skip them.) Figure 7.4 presents a couple of examples.

Figure 7.4 Uroboros idea collisions

Now, the examples in Figure 7.4 are just the first ideas that came to me, as they

should be for you. We’re still not doing a lot of filtering in this phase. Write

down all the different ideas that you come up with in this phase.

Step 4: Rating Phase

mix. Your mind makes the link between the two disparate, seemingly

unrelated concepts, and the joy that causes comes across as humor.

The same thing happens when you intersect two ideas, and this is why it

is so pleasurable for us to get the eureka moment of intersecting two

common ideas into a new uncommon one.

Now that you have a lot of ideas, it’s time to start culling them. Each person

should write on the whiteboard the two ideas from Step 3 that they think have

the most merit.

After everyone has done this, then all people should simultaneously put a mark

next to the three ideas written on the board that they like the most. You should

end up with some ideas with lots of marks and some with very few.

Step 5: Discussion

Continue the culling process by modifying and combining several of the ideas

with the highest rating. With dozens of different crazy ideas to choose from,

you should be able to find a couple that sound really good and to combine them

into a great starting point for your design. As the final step in the brainstorming

process, this is the time to really think about what your team can do in the time

that they have. This is when your hypothetical team remembers that they only

had 48 hours to begin with and chooses an idea that they can implement within

less than half that time (to allow time for more iteration, of course).

Changing Your Mind

Changing your mind is a key part of the iterative design process. As you work

through the different iterations of your game, you will inevitably make changes

to your design.

As shown in Figure 7.5, no one ever has an idea and turns it directly into a

game with no changes at all (as shown in the top half of the figure), or if

anyone ever does, it’s almost certain to be a terrible game. In reality, what

happens is a lot more like the bottom half of the figure. You have an idea and

make an initial prototype. The results of that prototype give you some ideas,

and you make another prototype. Maybe that one didn’t work out so well, so

you backtrack and make another. You continue this process until you’ve forged

your idea over time into a great game, and if you stick to the process and

engage in listening and creative collaboration, it will not only be different from

the original game you set out to make but also much better.

Figure 7.5

The reality of game design

As the Project Progresses, You’re More Locked In

The process just described is fantastic for small projects or the ideation phase

of any project, but after you have a lot of people who have put a lot of time into

something, changing your mind is much more difficult and expensive to do. A

standard professional game is developed in several distinct phases:

Ideation:

This covers not only the brainstorming in the previous

section but also very early prototypes and research into other games as

prior art or competitors. The sky is the limit in this phase, and you

should feel free to try some crazy ideas. At the end of ideation, you must

have chosen the core player experience goals of your game—how you

want your players to feel and the emotional experiences they will have

as they play the game—as described by Tracy Fullerton in her book

Game Design Workshop.

It’s best to also have a simple prototype of

the core mechanic of your game.

11 Tracy Fullerton, Christopher Swain, and Steven Hoffman. Game Design Workshop: A Playcentric

Approach to Creating Innovative Games, 2nd ed. (Boca Raton, FL: Elsevier Morgan Kaufmann, 2008),

10–11.

Preproduction:

This is the phase covered by most of this book. In the

preproduction phase, you’re experimenting with different prototypes,

and you’re trying to find something that is demonstrably enjoyable and

engaging. During preproduction, changing your mind about things is

perfectly fine. On a large industry project, there would be between 4 and

16 people on the project during preproduction, and at the end of this

phase, you typically would want to have created a vertical slice, which is

a short, five-minute section of your game at the same level of quality as

the final game. This is like a demo level for the executives and other

decision-makers to play and decide whether or not to move the game

into production. See the section “Scope Management via Preproduction

Deliverables” later in this chapter for much more information on the

deliverables required at the end of preproduction.

Production: In the industry, when you enter the production phase of a

game, your team will grow considerably in size. On a large game title,

there could be well over 100 people working on the game at this point,

many of whom might not be in the same city or even country as you.

During production, all the systems design (i.e., the game mechanics)

need to be locked down very early, and other design aspects (like level

design, tuning character abilities, and such) will be progressively locked

down throughout production as the team finalizes them. From an

aesthetics side, the production phase is when all the modeling, texturing,

animation, and other implementation of aesthetic elements take place.

The production phase expands the high quality of the vertical slice out

across the rest of the project.

Alpha:

When you have reached the alpha phase of your game, all the

functionality and game mechanics should be 100 percent locked down.

At this point, there are no more changes to the systems design of the

game, and the only changes you should make to things like level design

will be in response to specific problems discovered through playtesting.

This phase is where playtesting transitions to quality assurance (QA)

testing in an effort to find problems and bugs (see Chapter 10, “Game

Testing,” for more information). When you start alpha, there may still be

some bugs (i.e., errors in programming), but you should have identified

all of them and know how to reproduce them.

Beta:

In the beta phase, the game should be effectively done. At beta,

you should have fixed any bugs that had the potential to crash your

game, and the only remaining bugs should be minor. The purpose of the

beta period is to find and fix the last of the bugs in your game. From the

art side, this means making sure that every texture is mapped properly,

that every bit of text is spelled properly, etc. You are not making any

new changes in the beta phase, just fixing any last problems that you can

find.

Gold:

When your project goes gold, it is ready to ship. This name is a

holdover from the days of CD-ROM production when the master for any

CD was actually a disc made of gold onto which the foil layer of each

CD was physically pressed. Now that even disc-based console games

have updates delivered online, the gold phase has lost some of its

finality, but gold is still the name for the game being ship-ready.

Post-release:

With the ubiquity of the Internet today, all games that

aren’t on ancient hardware can be tuned

after they’re released (by

“ancient,” I mean non-Internet-connected consoles or consoles that

lacked any persistent internal storage could not be tuned). The post-

release period can also be used for development of downloadable

content (DLC). Because DLC is often composed of new missions and

levels, each DLC release goes through the same phases of development

as the larger game (though on a much smaller scale): preproduction,

production, alpha, beta, and gold.

12 Tuning is the term for the final stages of adjustments to game mechanics where only tiny changes are

made.

Even though your initial projects will usually be much smaller than the

professional ones just described, it is still imperative that you lock yourself into

design decisions as early as is reasonable. On a professional team, a major

design change in the production phase can cost millions of dollars, but on an

indie team, it can easily push the release of the game back months, years, or

forever. As you move forward in your career, no one will care about your half-

finished games or unimplemented game ideas, but everyone will care about the

games you have finished and shipped. Shipping games builds a reputation for

effectiveness, and that’s what people are looking for in a game developer.

Scoping!

One critical concept you must understand to act like a game designer is how to

scope your work. Scoping is the process of limiting the design to what can

reasonably be accomplished with the time and resources that you have

available, and overscoping is the number one killer of amateur game projects.

I’ll say that again:

Overscoping is the number one killer of game projects.

Most of the games you see and play took dozens of people months and months

of full-time work to create. Some large console games cost nearly $500 million

to develop. The teams on these projects are all composed of fantastic people

who have been doing their jobs well for years.

I’m not trying to discourage you, but I am trying to convince you to think

small. For your own sake, don’t try to make the next Dark Souls or World of

Warcraft or any other large, famous game you can think of. Instead find a

small, really cool core mechanic and explore it deeply in a small game.

If you want some fantastic inspiration, check out the games that are nominated

each year at the IndieCade Game Festival. IndieCade is the premier festival for

independent games of various sizes, and I think it represents the vanguard of

where independent games are going.

If you take a look at their website

(http://indiecade.com), you can see tons of fantastic games, each of which

pushes the boundaries of gaming in a cool new way. Each of these was

someone’s passion project, and many of them took hundreds or thousands of

hours of effort for a small team or an individual to create.

13 For purposes of full disclosure, since 2013, I have served as IndieCade’s Chair for Education and

Advancement, and I am very proud to belong to such a great organization.

As you look at them, you might be surprised by how small in scale they are.

That’s okay. Even though the scope of these games is pretty small, they are still

fantastic enough to be considered for an IndieCade award.

As you progress in your career, you may go on to make massive games like

God of War or Horizon: Zero Dawn, but remember that everyone got their start

somewhere. Before George Lucas made Star Wars, he was just a talented kid in

the film program at the University of Southern California. In fact, even when

he made Star Wars, he scoped it down so perfectly that he was able to make

one of the highest-grossing movies of all time for only $11 million. (It went on

to make over $775 million at the box office and many, many times that in toy

sales, home movie sales, and so on.)

So for now, think small. Come up with something that you know you can make

in a short amount of time, work on it efficiently, and above all,

finish it.

If you

make something great, you can always add on to it later.

Scope Management via Preproduction Deliverables

To keep your games in scope, you must know what will be included in them.

Over the many years in this industry, however, we have learned that the archaic

process of writing a 100-page design document before starting development

was a horrible waste of time and resources. Luckily, there is a much better way.

In his talk at the 2002 D.I.C.E. Summit,

Mark Cerny (who has designed and

programmed games for more than 40 years and most recently was Lead

Architect of the PlayStation 4 and 5 consoles) introduced what has since come

to be known as the Cerny Method. This method has become so integrated into

the industry that many people don’t even know it came from him. Cerny’s core

argument was that the success or failure of a game was decided by the

deliverables that a team created in preproduction. In his talk, Cerny separated

the macro level of design that can (and must) be done in preproduction from

the micro level of design that cannot happen before the production phase.

14 Mark Cerny, “Method” (presented at the 2002 D.I.C.E. Summit, Las Vegas, United States) —

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOAW9ioWAvE — accessed October 22, 2021.

In the two decades since Cerny’s initial talk, nearly all teams have come to

embrace preproduction, and the most successful focus on three core

preproduction deliverables: the Vertical Slice, the Macro Document, and the

Macro Chart. Of these, I had personally been using the first two for many

years but only became familiar with the Macro Chart when it was introduced to

me by Richard Lemarchand. In his keynote at the 2019 Freeplay conference,

Lemarchand gave an excellent overview of the preproduction and production

process that he helped develop at Naughty Dog. In 2021, Lemarchand released

his book A Playful Production Process: For Game Designers (and

Everyone),

which covers the entire production process in detail. For more

information about preproduction deliverables and improving the production

process in general, please see Lemarchand’s talk and book, as well as Cerny’s

original talk. The sections below give a brief outline of these deliverables that

combines my experience with what I’ve learned from these sources.

Richard Lemarchand, “How to Build a Healthy, Happy Game” (presented at the Freeplay

conference, Melbourne, Australia, May 12, 2019) — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46DzdaN0JbU

— accessed July 23, 2021.

16 Richard Lemarchand, A Playful Production Process: For Game Designers (and Everyone)

(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2021), 151–180.

Vertical Slice

The Vertical Slice is a fully-realized small section of your game. If anyone

outside your team were to see it, they would assume that it was a couple levels

of a finished game. Cerny lists several elements that must be part of a good

Vertical Slice (which at the time, he called the “Publishable” First Playable):

The

Three Cs

These define the core experience of the player.

Character:

Who or what does your player control when playing the

game? You must know how the character looks and how it moves

through space (i.e., the character moveset), and how it interacts with

the world (including interactions with other players, such as combat).

This could be a traditional character like Mario or Link, a car in a

racing game, or squads of units in a real-time strategy game.

Camera:

How is the game presented to the player through their

screen? Cameras are particularly difficult to manage in 3D games, but

even in 2D games, understanding the camera perspective and how it

will move is critical.

Control: How does the player interact with both the character and

camera through their controller or other interface?

The look of the game: To stand out, your game must have a unique

look that differentiates it. An excellent example of this by a small team

is Sable,

an exploration game that was visually inspired by the art of

Mœbius.

Games have finally passed the point of exclusively

attempting to look as realistic as possible, which is a huge boon for small

teams who can create a unique look without the expense of hyper-

realistic art assets. Cerny states that this cannot be only concept art.

Though concept art should be included in the Macro Document, the look

of the game must be reified in the playable vertical slice to prove it is

possible in the chosen game engine.

Sable was released in 2021 by Shedworks, which initially started the project as a two-person studio

in 2017. More info is available at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sable_(video_game) – accessed October

22, 2021.

For some examples, search for “Moebius art” on the Internet.

Key technology:

If your game relies on new technology being

developed, it should be demonstrated within the vertical slice. My

former professor, Dr. Randy Pausch, referred to this as the “gold spike”

of a project.

He recommended that you choose the most difficult

technological task in the project and accomplish it first, because then all

the other technical hurdles are easier.

The term gold spike has a problematic history, but I chose to include it here out of respect for Dr.

Pausch and because it’s something I hear a lot in the industry. The initial golden spike was the final

spike that connected the Central Pacific Railroad from California to the Union Pacific Railroad from

Nebraska to create the First Transcontinental Railroad in 1869. Prior to that point, a railroad started at

one end and finished at the other. The golden spike proved that navigation technology was now good

enough to start at each end and meet in the middle. This is problematic because the photographs of the

ceremony and the written history of the railroad have traditionally ignored the labor and sacrifice of the

roughly 20,000 Chinese immigrants who did the actual work of creating that railroad. An article about

the railroad itself and the omission of the Chinese immigrants can be found at

https://www.npca.org/articles/2192-golden-spike-redux – accessed October 22, 2021.

Of this, Cerny would probably say that if you can’t solve a technical

problem in preproduction, there’s no reason to believe that you could

solve it in production. However, he also states that you can “double-

track” the development of this key technology, with one team working

on the vertical slice with a “quick and dirty” stand-in for the technology

and another team working on the actual tech. The key is that both must

be finished by the end of preproduction, regardless of whether the final

version of the tech is actually included in the vertical slice.

Two game levels of publishable quality:

For a character-driven

action game like Super Mario Bros. or Crash Bandicoot, Cerny believes

that you should make five or more levels during preproduction and only

polish the best two into a vertical slice. He recommends two levels so

that you can show two different aspects of gameplay (he states that in

Crash Bandicoot, this would be one level from the side-scrolling

perspective of most levels of the game and one of the levels where Crash

is running toward the screen, away from a boulder that is chasing him).

Your game might not be easily divided into levels, but the key is that you

should have a playable game at a level of quality that could be released

to players, including all gameplay actions that would be in that level

when the final game was released.

If a team can’t create a compelling vertical slice at the level of quality of a

finished game during preproduction, then there’s no reason to believe that they

could create a compelling game at the end of production. Cerny strongly

suggests that if the vertical slice isn’t compelling, the project should be

canceled, and preproduction should begin on a different project.

Cerny stated in 2002 that the preproduction phase of a large commercial game

could take up to a year. Lemarchand recommends that ideation and

preproduction phases together should comprise about 40 percent of the total

time on a project, whether that project is a weekend game jam or a massive

four-year commercial game.

In my classes, the result of a full semester of

work on a game is similar to what would be seen as a vertical slice in industry,

so I encourage my students to create a vertical sliver in preproduction. All of

the core elements of the vertical slice still apply, but rather than having all art,

game mechanics, and audio finalized, the level in the vertical sliver will have

some finalized examples but still contain placeholders for most assets.

20 See Lemarchand’s full chart from his 2019 Freeplay keynote at https://bit.ly/healthy-game-project-

freeplay-2019 – accessed October 22, 2021.

Macro Document / Requirements Document

What Cerny called the Macro Document is very similar to the Requirements

Documents that I wrote when I was working in the industry. Both are short, 5–

10 page documents that outline the core design of the game—and in my current

practice, I combine the two. This document should include descriptions of all

the following, which game designer Scott Rogers

would remind you could be

either text or illustrations:

21 Scott Rogers, Level up!: The Guide to Great Video Game Design (Chichester, UK: Wiley, 2010),

page xviii.

Basic Information

Title of the game

Names of the team members

Logline / elevator pitch for the game:

Sum up your game in less

than a paragraph to hook the reader and get them to want to learn

more. This should include the title, the genre, and what makes it

unique. An example from my past is:

Skyrates is a Massively Singleplayer Online Game where players fly

between floating islands trading goods, fighting pirates, and

upgrading their plane. Flights happen in real time, making Skyrates a

sporadic game that can be played like checking your email, five

minutes at a time throughout your day.

Of course, you may be wondering what a Massively Singleplayer game or a sporadic game are, but

the goal of the logline is to pique your interest. Everything in the logline can be explained and expanded

later. Our concept of a MSOG was a game where you played in an online world as a single-player game,

but your actions affected the game for all players (e.g., if you buy all the catnip on a skyland, no one

else could buy it).

Player experience goals:

What emotions do you want the player to

feel while playing your game? When players think back about the

game, what experiences do you want them to remember? These are

decided in the ideation phase and used throughout preproduction and

production to determine whether a game mechanic, art style, narrative

beat, or any other aspect would be a good fit for this game.

Game Design Information

Character and moveset:

Who is the character and what can they

do?

Exotic mechanics: A description of any game mechanics that make

the game stand out or that would be new to the player.

Structural information:

Is the game divided into levels? If so, how

many? Are the levels linear, a hub-and-spoke model, or something

else?

Holistic design information: Cerny used the term holistic design to

mean games where the player accesses new areas in old levels via

skills or equipment that they obtain (e.g., the Metroid, Castlevania,

and Zelda series). This makes level design considerably more

challenging, and the Macro Document should include broad

information about how the holistic design will work if it is present in

this game. Two examples from the Metroid series are:

The morphball ability enables the player to move through tunnels that

are only one unit high, opening up many new areas.

The bomb ability enables the player to place bombs when in

morphball mode. These bombs can temporarily destroy nearby blocks,

opening new tunnels and areas.

Market Information

Unique selling points:

The five bullet points that you imagine

would be on the back of the box (if games still came in boxes). As

Rogers says, “great graphics” and “awesome gameplay” don’t count

because every game can claim those. Choose the unique things about

your game that give it an edge.

23 Scott Rogers, Level up!: The Guide to Great Video Game Design (Chichester, UK: Wiley, 2010), 61–

62.

Platform and audience:

On which platforms do you plan to release

the game (e.g., Xbox, iOS, etc.)? Who is the core audience that you

expect to play the game? Who do you expect to buy the game? These

last two can often be different when it comes to children’s games,

where the child’s parent is the person you must convince to buy the

game.

Competitive analysis and prior art:

What similar games are

already in the market (or in development) that will be compared with

this game? What makes this game different—and better—than those

games? In terms of prior art, what other media already exists that you

can learn from (e.g., the Lord of the Rings books, the Dungeons and

Dragons roleplaying system, and the digital games made from both

were all prior art for Skyrim). For my students’ games, it is often

easier for them to think of commercial games as prior art, rather than

products that they need to compete with.

Concept art: It’s always nice to close a Macro Document with some

beautiful concept pieces for your game. This doesn’t need to exactly

match the graphics in the Vertical Slice, but it helps readers understand

the visual inspiration and direction for your game.

It will be difficult to fit all of this information into just 5–10 pages, but at the

macro level, you need to focus on the big picture. In general, a 5-page Macro

Document is stronger than a 10-page one.

Macro Chart

One of the best tools I’ve seen for scoping a project well is the game design

Macro Chart, as used by Naughty Dog

and presented by Richard Lemarchand

in his keynote at the 2019 Freeplay conference.

Lemarchand states that for

single-semester or shorter projects, he often allows students to work without a

Macro Document, but he always requires them to create a Macro Chart.

The

Macro Chart (sometimes referred to as the Game Design Macro) gathers the

entire scope of your game into a single spreadsheet, showing for each level the

basics of what is required to create the level and what is expected to happen in

the level. Of course, your game might not be level-based, but across all of my

recent students’ projects, I have found a way for them to create a Macro Chart

during preproduction that has helped them to specify, understand, and limit the

scope of their games. For an excellent overview of the Macro Chart, watch

Lemarchand’s talk.

For a much deeper dive into this and several other tools

for making the development of your game smoother and happier, read A

Playful Production Process: For Game Designers (and Everyone),

Lemarchand’s 2021 book on integrating design and production management

for games, which provides two full chapters about how to best use Macro

Charts in your projects.

A template from which to create your own Macro

Charts and some examples can be found on the website for Lemarchand’s

book.

The game design macro was first invented for Crash Bandicoot 2 and then was expanded through

several projects at Naughty Dog and Insomniac, including all the Uncharted series. Richard

Lemarchand, A Playful Production Process: For Game Designers (and Everyone) (Cambridge, MA:

MIT Press, 2021), 153. Prior to joining the University of Southern California faculty, Richard

Lemarchand was the Co-Lead Designer of the first three games in the Uncharted series for Naughty

Dog.

25 Richard Lemarchand, “How to Build a Healthy, Happy Game” (presented at the Freeplay

conference, Melbourne, Australia, May 12, 2019) — https://www.youtube.com/watch?

v=46DzdaN0JbU&t=22m — accessed July 23, 2021.

26 Richard Lemarchand, A Playful Production Process: For Game Designers (and Everyone)

(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2021), 154.

In this book, I go into less detail about the Macro Chart than the Vertical Slice or Macro Document

because Lemarchand’s Freeplay 2019 keynote (footnote 24) has many more images and examples than I

could fit in this chapter.

28 Richard Lemarchand, A Playful Production Process: For Game Designers (and Everyone)

(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2021), 151–180.

29 Under Chapters 17 and 18 at https://www.playfulproductionprocess.com/templates/ – accessed

October 22, 2021.

Summary

The tools and theories you’ve read in this chapter are the kinds of things that I

teach to my students and use in my personal design. I have seen the

brainstorming strategies that I listed work in both big and small groups to

create interesting, off-the-wall, yet implementable ideas, and every experience

that I have had in the industry and academia has led me to feel that iterative

design, rapid prototyping, and proper scoping are the key processes that you

can implement to improve your designs. I enthusiastically recommend them to

you.

Chapter 8. Design Goals

This chapter explores several important goals that you may have

for your games. We cover everything from the deceptively complex

goal of fun to the goal of experiential understanding, which may be

unique to interactive experiences.

As you read this chapter, think about which of these goals matter

to you. The relative importance of these goals to each other will

shift as you move from project to project and can even shift as you

move through the various phases of development. However, you

should always be aware of all of them, and even if one is not

important to you, that should be due to deliberate choice rather

than unintentional omission.

Design Goals: An Incomplete List

You could have any number of goals in mind when designing a game or

interactive experience, and I’m sure that each of you has one that won’t be

covered in this chapter. However, I am going to try to cover most of the

goals that I see in my personal work as a designer and in the design work of

my students and friends.

Designer-Centric Goals

Designer-centric goals focus on you as the designer. What do you want to

get out of designing this game?

Fortune: You want to make money.

Fame: You want people to know who you are.

Community: You want to be part of something.

Personal expression: You want to communicate with others

through games.

Greater good: You want to make the world better in some way.

Becoming a better designer: You simply want to make games and

improve your craft.

Player-Centric Goals

Player-centric goals focus on what you want for the players of your game:

Fun: You want players to enjoy your game.

Lusory attitude: You want players to take part in the fantasy of

your game.

Flow: You want players to be optimally challenged.

Structured conflict: You want to give players a way to combat

others or challenge your game systems.

Empowerment: You want players to feel powerful in both the

game and the metagame.

Interest/attention/involvement: You want the player to be

engaged by your game.

Meaningful decisions: You want players’ choices to have meaning

to them and the game.

Experiential understanding: You want the player to gain

understanding through play.

Now let’s explore each in detail.

Designer-Centric Goals

As a game designer and developer, there are some goals for your life that

you hope the games you make might help you achieve.

Fortune

My friend John “Chow” Chowanec has been in the game industry for years.

The first time I met him, he gave me and my fellow students some advice

about making money in the game industry. He said:

You can literally make hundreds of

…dollars in the game industry.

As he hinted through his joke, there are a lot of faster, better ways to make

money than the game industry. I tell my programming students that if they

want to make money, they should go work for a bank; banks have lots of

money and are very interested in paying someone to help them keep it.

However, the game industry is just like every other entertainment industry

job: There are fewer jobs available than people who want them, and people

generally enjoy doing the work; so, entertainment companies can pay less

than other companies for the same kind of employees. Certainly, some

people in the game industry make a lot of money, but they are few and far

between.

However, making a decent living working in the game industry is

absolutely possible—particularly if you’re a single person without kids.

This is especially true if you’re working for a larger game company where

they tend to have good salaries and benefits. Smaller companies (or starting

your own small company) are generally a lot riskier and usually pay worse,

but you might have a chance to earn a percentage ownership in the

company or royalties for the game project, which could have a chance of

eventually paying out very nicely.

Fame

I’ll be honest: Very, very few people become famous for game design.

Becoming a game designer because you want to be famous is a little like

becoming a special effects artist in film because you want to be famous.

Usually with games, even if millions of people see your work, very few will

know who you are.

Of course, there are some famous names like Sid Meier, Will Wright, and

John Romero, but all of those people have been making games for years

and have been famous for it for equally long. There are also some newer

people whom you might know like Jenova Chen, Jonathan Blow, and

Markus “Notch” Persson, but even then, people are generally much more

familiar with their games (Flow/Flower/Journey, Braid/The Witness, and

Minecraft, respectively) than with them.

However, what I personally find to be far better than fame is community,

and the game industry has that in spades. The game industry is smaller than

anyone on the outside would ever expect, and it’s a great community. In

particular, I have always been impressed by the acceptance and openness of

the independent game community and the IndieCade game conference.

Community

There are, of course, many different communities within the game industry,

but on the whole, I have found it to be a pretty fantastic place filled with

great people. Many of my closest friends are people whom I met through

working in the game industry or in games education. Though a sad number

of high-budget, AAA games appear sexist and violent, in my experience,

most of the people working on games are genuinely good people, and over

the last several years, we have seen several games with strong protagonists

who aren’t just a default white male. A large and vibrant community of

developers, designers, and artists are also working to make games that are

more progressive and created from more varied perspectives. Over the

many years of the IndieCade independent game conference and the Game

Developers Conference, there have been very well attended panels on

diversity in both the games we make and the development teams who are

making those games. The independent game community in particular is a

meritocracy; if you make great work, you will be welcomed and respected

by the indie community regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation,

religion, or creed. There is certainly still room to improve the openness of

the game development community—and there are always some jerks in any

group—but the game development community is full of people who want to

make it a welcoming place for everyone.

Personal Expression and Communication

The goal of personal expression and communication is the flip side of the

player-centric goal of experiential understanding that you’ll read about in a

moment. However, personal expression and communication can take many

more forms than experiential understanding (which is the exclusive domain

of interactive media). Designers and artists have been expressing

themselves in all forms of media for hundreds of years. If you have

something that you want to express, there are two important questions to

ask yourself:

What medium could best express this concept?

What forms of media am I adept at using?

Somewhere between these two questions is where you’ll find the answer of

whether an interactive piece will be the best way for you to express

yourself. The good news is that there is a very eager audience seeking new

personal expressions in the interactive realm. Very personal interactive

pieces such as Papo y Yo, Mainichi, and That Dragon, Cancer have

received significant attention and critical acclaim, signaling the growing

maturity of interactive experiences as a conduit for personal expression.1

1 Papo y Yo (2014, by Minority Media) places the player in the dream world of a boy trying to

protect himself and his sister from a sometimes-helpful, sometimes-violent monster that represents

his alcoholic father. Mainichi (2013, by Mattie Brice) was designed to express to a friend of hers

what it was like to be a transgender black woman living in San Francisco. That Dragon, Cancer

(2014, by Ryan Green and Josh Larson) relates the experience of a couple learning that their young

son has terminal cancer and helped Ryan deal with his own son’s cancer.

Greater Good

A number of people make games because they want to make the world a

better place. These games are often called serious games or games for

change and are the subject of several developer’s conferences, including the

Meaningful Play conference here at Michigan State University. This genre

of games can also be a great way for a small studio to get off the ground

and do some good in the world; a number of government agencies,

companies, and nonprofit organizations offer grants and contracts for

developers interested in making serious games (and this is especially true

outside of the United States).

Many names are used to describe games for the greater good. Three of the

biggest are

Serious games: This is one of the oldest and most general names

for games of this type. These games can, of course, still be fun; the

“serious” moniker is just to note that there is a purpose behind the

game that is more than just playful. One common example of this

category is educational games.

Games for social change: This category of games for good is

typically used to encompass games that are meant to influence people

or change their minds about a topic. Games about things such as

global warming, government budget deficits, or the virtues and vices

of various political candidates would fall into this category.

Games for behavioral change: The intent of these games is not to

change the mind or opinion of the player (as in games for social

change) but instead to change a player’s behavior outside of the

game. For example, many medicinal games have been created to

discourage childhood obesity, improve attention spans, combat

depression, and detect things like childhood amblyopia. There is a

large and growing amount of research demonstrating that games and

game play can have significant effects (both positive and negative)

on mental and physical health. Examples of this kind of game made

by Nintendo include Wii Fit and Ring Fit Adventure.

Becoming a Better Designer

The number one thing you can do to become a great game designer is make

games…or more accurately, make a lot of games. The purpose of this book

is to help you get started doing this, and it’s one of the reasons that the

tutorials at the end of the book cover several different games rather than

having just one monolithic tutorial that meanders through various game

development topics. Each tutorial is focused on making a prototype for a

specific kind of game and covering a few specific topics, and the prototypes

you make are meant to serve not only as learning tools but also as

foundations upon which you can build your own games in the future.

Player-Centric Goals

As a game designer and developer, there are also goals for your game that

are centered on the effects that you want the game to have on your player.

Fun

Many people regard fun as the only goal of games, though as a reader of

this book, you should know by now that this is not true. As discussed later

in this chapter, players are willing to play something that isn’t fun as long as

it grabs and holds their attention in some way. This is true with all forms of

art; I am glad to have watched the movies Schindler’s List, Life is Beautiful,

and What Dreams May Come, but none of them were at all “fun” to watch.

Even though it is not the only goal of games, the elusive concept of fun is

still critically important to game designers. In his book Game Design

Theory, Keith Burgun proposes three aspects that make a game fun.

According to him, it must be enjoyable, engaging, and fulfilling:

Enjoyable: There are many ways for something to be enjoyable,

and enjoyment in one form or another is what most players are

seeking when they approach a game. In his 1958 book Les Jeux et

Les Hommes,2 Roger Caillois identified four different kinds of play:

2 Roger Caillois, Le Jeux et Les Hommes (Man, Play, & Games) (Paris: Gallimard, 1958).

Agon: Competitive play (e.g., chess, baseball, the Uncharted

series)

Alea: Chance-based play (e.g., gambling and rock-paper-

scissors)

Ilinx: Vertiginous play (e.g., roller coasters, children spinning

around until they’re dizzy, and other play that makes the player

feel vertigo)

Mimicry: Play centered on make-believe and simulation (e.g.,

playing house, playing with action figures)

Each of these kinds of play is enjoyable in its own way, though in all

of them, that fun depends on having a lusory attitude (i.e., an attitude

of play, as discussed in the next section). As Chris Bateman points

out in his book Imaginary Games, a fine line exists between

excitement and fear in games of ilinx, the only difference being the

lusory attitude of the player.3 The Tower of Terror attraction at

Disney parks is a fun simulation of an out-of-control elevator, but it

is only fun if you believe that the elevator is not actually out of

control.

3 Chris Bateman, Imaginary Games. (Washington, USA: Zero Books, 2011), 26–28.

Engaging: The game must grab and hold the player’s attention. In

his 2012 talk, “Attention, Not Immersion,”4 at the Game Developers

Conference in San Francisco, Richard Lemarchand, co-lead game

designer of the Uncharted series of games, referred to this as

“attention,” and it’s a very important aspect of game design. I discuss

his talk in greater detail later in this chapter.

4 Lemarchand, Richard. “Attention, Not Immersion: Making Your Games Better with Psychology

and Playtesting, the Uncharted Way” (presented at the Game Developers Conference, San

Francisco, CA, 2012) — Video at https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1015745/Attention-Not-

Immersion-Making-Your — accessed October 16, 2021.

Fulfilling: Playing the game must fulfill some need or desire of the

player. As humans, we have many needs that can be met through play

in both real and virtual ways. The need for socialization and

community, for instance, can be met both through playing a board

game with friends or experiencing the day-to-day life of Animal

Crossing with the virtual friends who live in your town. You can

achieve the feeling of fiero (the Italian word for personal triumph

over adversity)5 by helping your team win a soccer match, defeating

a friend in fighting game like Tekken,6 or by eventually defeating the

final level in a difficult rhythm game like Osu! Tatake! Ouendan.

Different players have different needs, and the same player can have

drastically different needs from day to day.

5 Nicole Lazzaro discusses fiero often in her talks at GDC about emotions that drive players.

6 Thanks to my good friends Donald McCaskill and Mike Wabschall for introducing me to the

beautiful intricacies of Tekken 3 and for the thousands of matches we played together.

Lusory Attitude

In The Grasshopper, Bernard Suits talks at length about the lusory attitude:

the attitude one must have to take part in a game. When in the lusory

attitude, players happily follow the rules of the game for the joy of

eventually winning via the rules (and not by avoiding them). As Suits points

out, neither cheaters nor spoilsports have a lusory attitude; cheaters want to

win but not to follow the rules, and spoilsports may or may not follow the

rules but have no interest in winning the game.

As a designer, you should work toward games that encourage players to

maintain this lusory attitude. In large part, I believe that this means you

must show respect for your players and not take advantage of them. In

2008, my colleague Bryan Cash and I gave two talks at the Game

Developers Conference about what we termed sporadic-play games,7

games that the player plays sporadically throughout their day. Both talks

were based on our experience designing Skyrates8 (pronounced like

pirates), a graduate school project for which our team won some design

awards in 2008.9 In designing Skyrates we sought to make a persistent

online game (like the massively multiplayer online games [MMOs] of the

time; e.g., Blizzard’s World of Warcraft) that could easily be played by busy

people. Skyrates set players in the role of privateers of the skies, flying from

skyland (floating island) to skyland trading goods and battling pirates. The

sporadic aspect of the game was that each player was able to check in for a

few minutes at a time throughout their day, set orders for their skyrate

character, fight a few pirate battles, upgrade their ship or character, and then

let their skyrate play out the orders while the player themselves went about

their day. At various times during the day, they might receive a text

message on their phone letting them know that their skyrate was under

attack, but it was the player’s choice whether to jump into combat or to let

their skyrate handle it on her own.

7 Cash, Bryan and Gibson, Jeremy. “Sporadic Games: The History and Future of Games for Busy

People” (presented as part of the Social Games Summit at the Game Developers Conference, San

Francisco, CA, 2010) — Video at https://gdcvault.com/play/1012204/Sporadic-Play-The-History-

and — accessed July 24, 2021.

Cash, Bryan and Gibson, Jeremy “Sporadic Play Update: The Latest Developments in Games for

Busy People” (presented at the Game Developers Conference Online, Austin, TX, 2010) — Video

at https://gdcvault.com/play/1013822/Sporadic-Play-Game-Update-The — accessed July 24, 2021.

8 Skyrates was developed over the course of two semesters in 2006 while we were all graduate

students at Carnegie Mellon University’s Entertainment Technology Center. The developers were

Howard Braham, Bryan Cash, Jeremy Gibson (Bond), Chuck Hoover, Henry Clay Reister, Seth

Shain, and Sam Spiro, with character art by Chris Daniel. Our faculty advisors were Jesse Schell

and Dr. Drew Davidson. After Skyrates was released, we added the developers Phil Light and Jason

Buckner. The website is http://skyrates.net, though sadly it is now impossible to play Skyrates due

to Adobe retiring Flash.

9 Skyrates won the Silver Gleemax Award for Strategic Games at the 2008 Independent Game

Festival and the 2008 Best of Casual Gameplay Editors’ and Audience award for Simulation Game

on http://jayisgames.com.

As designers in the industry at the time, we were witnessing the rise of

social media games like FarmVille and the like that seemed to have little or

no respect for their players’ time. It was commonplace for games on social

networks to demand (through their mechanics) that players log in to the

game continually throughout the day, and players were punished for not

returning to the game on time. This was accomplished through a few

nefarious mechanics, the chief of which were energy and spoilage.

In social network games with energy as a resource, the player’s energy level

built slowly over time regardless of whether they was playing or not, but

there was a cap on the energy that could be earned by waiting, and that cap

was often considerably less than the amount that could be accrued in a day

and also less than the amount needed to accomplish the optimal player

actions each day. The result was that players were required to log in several

times throughout the day to spend the energy that had accrued and not

waste potential accrual time on capped-out energy. Of course, players were

also able to use real money to purchase additional energy that was not

capped and did not expire, and this drove a large amount of the sales in

these games.

The spoilage mechanic is best explained through FarmVille, in which

players could plant crops and were required to harvest them later. However,

if a crop was left unharvested for too long, it would spoil, and the player

would lose their investment in both the seeds and the time spent to grow

and nurture the crop. For higher-value crops, the delay before spoilage was

drastically less than that of low-value, beginner-level crops, so habitual

players found themselves required to return to the game within increasingly

small windows of time to get the most out of their investments.

Bryan and I hoped through our GDC talks to counter these trends or at least

offer some alternatives. The idea of a sporadic-play game is to give the

player the most agency (ability to make choices) in the least amount of

time. Our professor, Jesse Schell, once commented that Skyrates was like a

friend who reminded him to take a break from work every once in a while,

but after several minutes of play also reminded him to get back to work.

This kind of respect caused our game to have a conversion rate of more

than 90 percent, meaning that in 2007, more than 90 percent of the players

who initially tried the game became regular players.

The Magic Circle

As was mentioned briefly in Chapter 2, “Game Analysis Frameworks,” in

his 1938 book Homo Ludens, Johan Huizinga proposed an idea that has

come to be known as the magic circle. The magic circle is the space in

which a game takes place, and it can be mental, physical, or some

combination of the two. Within the magic circle, the rules hold sway over

the players, and the amount that certain actions are encouraged or

discouraged is different from the world of everyday life.

For example, when two friends are playing poker against each other, they

will often bluff (or lie) about the cards that they have and how certain they

are that they will win the pot. However, outside of the game, these same

friends would consider lying to each other to be a violation of their

friendship. Similarly, on the ice in the game of hockey, players routinely

shove and slam into each other (within specific rules, of course); however,

these players will still shake hands and sometimes be close friends outside

of the boundaries of the game.

As Ian Bogost10 and many other game theorists have pointed out, the magic

circle is a porous and temporary thing. Even children recognize this and

will sometimes call “time out” during make-believe play. Time out in this

sense denotes a suspension of the rules and a temporary cessation of the

magic circle, which is often done so that the players can discuss how the

rules should be shaped for the remainder of the game. When the discussion

is complete, “time in” is called, and both play and the magic circle continue

where they left off.

10 Ian Bogost, Play Anything: The Pleasure of Limits, the Uses of Boredom, & the Secret of Games

(New York: Basic Books, 2016).

Though pausing and resuming the magic circle is possible, it is sometimes

difficult to maintain the integrity of the magic circle through those pauses.

During long delays of football games (for example, if the game is delayed

30 minutes for weather in the middle of the second quarter), commentators

will often remark on how difficult it is for players to either maintain the

game mindset through the delay or get back into the game mindset when

play resumes.

Flow

As described by psychologist Mihaly Csíkszentmihályi11 (pronounced

chick-sent-me-high), flow is the state of optimal challenge, and it has been

discussed frequently at the Game Developers Conference because it relates

so closely to what many game designers are trying to create. In a flow state,

a player is focused intently on the challenge before them and very often

loses awareness of things that are outside of the flow experience. You have

probably felt this at times when you have played or worked so intently on

something that time seems distorted, either passing faster or more slowly

than normal.

11 Mihaly Csíkszentmihályi, Flow: the Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York:

HarperCollins Publishers, 1990).

Game flow in this sense was the subject of Jenova Chen’s MFA thesis paper

at the University of Southern California as well as the subject of his thesis

game, appropriately titled flOw.12 Jenova also spoke about this concept in

talks at GDC.

12 Sadly, the original Flash-based version of flOw can no longer be played due to Adobe’s retiring

Flash, but you can see a video of it at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hcZdUwWakcA —

accessed July 23, 2021. You can download an updated and expanded PlayStation 3 version (and its

PlayStation 4 and PlayStation Vita ports) from the PlayStation Store or see it at

https://thatgamecompany.com/flow/ — accessed July 23, 2021.

As you can see in Figure 8.1, the flow state exists between boredom and

frustration. If the game is too challenging for the player’s skill level, they

will feel frustrated; conversely, if the player is too skilled for the game, they

will feel bored.

Figure 8.1 Flow as described by Csíkszentmihályi

According to the 2002 article, “The Concept of Flow,” by Jeanne Nakamura

and Mihaly Csíkszentmihályi, the experience of flow is the same across

cultures, genders, ages, and various kinds of activity, and it relies on two

conditions:13

13 Jeanne Nakamura and Mihaly Csíkszentmihályi, “The Concept of Flow.” Handbook of positive

psychology (2002), 89–105, 90.

Perceived challenges, or opportunities for action, that stretch

(neither overmatching nor underutilizing) existing skills; a sense that

one is engaging challenges at a level appropriate to one’s capacities

Clear proximal goals and immediate feedback about the progress

that is being made

This is what much of the discussion of flow has centered on in the realm of

game design. Both of these conditions are concrete enough for designers to

understand how to implement them in their games, and through careful

testing and player interviews, it’s easy to measure whether your game is

doing so. However, since 1990, when Csíkszentmihályi published his book

Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, research has expanded our

understanding of flow as it relates to games in one very important way:

Designers now realize that flow is not something that players can maintain

for long periods of time. It turns out that while players enjoy flow—and

moments of flow are some of the most memorable moments of your games

—maintaining flow for more than 15 or 20 minutes is exhausting. In

addition, if the player is always kept in a perfect state of flow, they might

never have an opportunity to realize that their skill is improving. So, for

most players, you actually want a flow diagram like the one shown in

Figure 8.2.

Figure 8.2 Updated flow

A border exists between flow and boredom where the player feels powerful

and skillful (i.e., they feel awesome!), and players actually need that.

Although the flow state is powerful and successful, letting your players out

of the flow state into this powerful border is also important so that they can

reflect on what they accomplished while within flow. Think about the best

boss fight you’ve ever had in a game. When in a flow state, by definition,

you lose track of everything outside of the moment because flow requires

total attention. If you are like me, it wasn’t until you had actually defeated

the boss that you had a moment to breathe and realize how amazing the

fight had been. Players need not only these moments to pause and reflect

but also moments to revel in their increased skill.

Like many other games, the original God of War (2005) game did this very

well. It would consistently introduce the player to a single opponent of a

new type, and this often felt like a mini boss fight because the player hadn’t

yet figured out the strategies for defeating that type of enemy. The player

eventually learned the strategy for that particular enemy and over several

encounters with single enemies of this type perfected their skill. Then,

several minutes later, the player was required to fight more than one of this

enemy type simultaneously, though because they had increased in skill, this

was actually less of a challenge than the single opponent had been

originally. The player’s new ability to easily dispatch several copies of the

enemy that had given them trouble singly demonstrated to them that they

had increased in skill and made the player feel awesome.

As you design your games, remember that it’s not just about giving the

player an optimal challenge; it’s also about giving them the understanding

that they are getting better and granting them time to just be awesome.

After a difficult fight, give the player some time to just be powerful. This

encourages feelings of empowerment.

Structured Conflict

As you saw in Chapter 1, “Thinking Like a Designer,” structured conflict is

one of the human needs that can be fulfilled by games. One of the primary

differences between play and game is that game always involves struggle or

conflict, which can be conflict against other players or conflict against the

systems of the game (see the section, “Player Relationships” in Chapter 4,

“The Inscribed Layer”). This conflict gives players a chance to test their

skill (or that of their team) against others, against systems, against chance,

or against themselves.

This desire for structured conflict is also evident in the play of animals. As

Chris Bateman points out in Imaginary Games:

When our puppy plays with other dogs, there are clear limits as to what

is acceptable behavior. When play fighting with another puppy, there is

much gentle biting, climbing upon one another and general rolling

around in frenzied mock violence; there are rules of a kind here.14

14 Chris Bateman, Imaginary Games. (Washington, USA: Zero Books, 2011), 24.

Even in some actual wars, there have been game-like rules. In the memoir

of his life, Chief Plenty-Coups of the Native American Crow tribe relates

some of the rules of counting coup in battle. Coup was counted for getting

away with dangerous actions on the battlefield. Striking an armed and able

enemy warrior with a coup-stick, quirt (short riding whip), or bow before

otherwise harming him; stealing an enemy’s weapons while he was still

alive; stealing horses or weapons from an enemy camp; and striking the

first enemy to fall in battle (before he was killed) all counted for coup.

Doing so while avoiding injury to oneself counted more. Plenty-coups also

spoke of rules regarding the two symbolic sticks of tribal fraternities.

One of these sticks in each society was straight and bore one eagle’s

feather on its smaller end. If in battle its carrier stuck this stick into the

ground, he must not retreat or leave the stick. He must drop his robe

[die] there unless relieved by a brother member of his society riding

between him and the enemy. He might then move the stick with honor,

but while it was sticking in the ground it represented the Crow country.

The bearers of the crooked sticks, each having two feathers, might at

their discretion move them to better stands after sticking them to mark a

position. But they must die in losing them to the enemy. By striking coup

with any of these society coup-sticks, the bearers counted double, two

for one, since their lives were in greater danger while carrying them.15

15 Frank Bird Linderman, Plenty-Coups, Chief of the Crows, New ed. (Lincoln, NE: University of

Nebraska Press, 2002), 31–32. The autobiography was initially published in 1930, when Plenty-

Coups was 82.

After the battle, coup was counted, as each warrior related the tales of their

exploits during the battle. For successfully performing a coup and escaping

without being harmed, the warrior would receive an eagle feather that could

be worn in the hair or attached to a coup-stick. If they had been injured, the

feather was painted red.

The activity of counting coup among the Native American tribes of the

plains lent additional meaning to the wars between nations and provided a

structured way for acts of bravery on the battlefield to translate into

increased respect when the battle was complete.

Many of today’s most popular games provide for structured conflict

between teams of players, including all traditional team sports (soccer,

football, basketball, and hockey being the most popular worldwide) as well

as online team competitions like League of Legends, Team Fortress 2, and

Overwatch. But even without teams, games as a whole provide ways for

players to engage in conflict and triumph over adversity.

Empowerment

The earlier section on flow covered one kind of empowerment (giving the

player the feeling that they are powerful in the game world). This section

covers another kind of empowerment: giving the player power over what

they choose to do in the game. I mean this in two senses: autotelic and

performative.

Autotelic

The term autotelic comes from the Latin words for self (auto) and goal

(telos).People are autotelic when they are determining their own goals for

themselves. When Csíkszentmihályi initially started developing his theory

of flow, he knew that autotelisis would have a major role in it. According to

his research, autotelic individuals get the most pleasure out of flow

situations, whereas nonautotelic individuals (that is, those who don’t enjoy

setting their own goals) tend to get more pleasure out of easy situations

where they perceive their skill level to be much higher than the difficulty

level of the challenge.16 Csíkszentmihályi believes that it is an autotelic

personality that enables a person to find happiness in life regardless of

situation.17

16 Nakamura and Csíkszentmihályi, “The Concept of Flow,” 98.

17 Mihaly Csíkszentmihályi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York: Harper &

Row, 1990), 69.

So, what kinds of games encourage autotelic behavior? One fantastic

example is Minecraft. In this game, the player is dropped into a randomly

generated world where their only real goal is survival. (Zombies and other

monsters will attack the player at night.) However, they are also given the

ability to mine the environment for resources and then use those resources

to make both tools and structures. Players of Minecraft have not only built

castles, bridges, and a full-scale model of the Star Trek Enterprise NCC-

1701D but also roller coasters that run for many kilometers and even simple

working computers.18 This is the true genius of Minecraft: It gives players

the opportunity to choose their own path as players and provides them with

flexible game systems that enable that choice.

18 http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/109385-Computer-Built-in-Minecraft-Has-RAM-

Performs-Division — accessed July 24, 2021.

Although most games are less flexible than Minecraft, it is still possible to

allow the player multiple ways to approach a problem. One of the reasons

for the loss in popularity of both text-based adventures (e.g., Zork,

Planetfall, and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Infocom) and the

point-and-click adventure games that followed them (e.g., the King’s Quest

and Space Quest series by Sierra OnLine and the pinnacle of point-and-

click adventures, The Curse of Monkey Island by LucasArts) is that they

often allowed only a single (often obtuse) approach to most problems. In

Space Quest II, if you didn’t grab a jockstrap from a random locker at the

very beginning of the game, you couldn’t use it as a sling much later in the

game, and you would have to restart the game from the beginning. In

Infocom’s game version of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, when a

bulldozer approached your house, you had to lie down in the mud in front

of it and then “wait” three times. If you didn’t do this exactly, you would

die and have to restart the game.19 Contrast this with more modern games

like the Dishonored series by Arkane Studios, where nearly every problem

has at least one violent and one nonviolent solution. Giving the player

choice over how they will accomplish their goals builds player interest in

the game and player ownership over successes.20

19 One of the major reasons that this was done was because of the multiplicative explosions of

content that would occur if the player were allowed to do anything they wanted in the game

narrative. The closest thing that I have seen to a truly open, branching narrative is the interactive

drama Façade by Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern.

20 However, you must also keep development cost and time in perspective. If you’re not careful,

every option that you give your player could increase the cost of development, both in terms of

monetary cost and in terms of time. It’s a careful balance that you must maintain as a designer and

developer.

Performative

The other kind of empowerment that is important to games is performative

empowerment. In Game Design Theory, Keith Burgun states that not only

are game designers creating art, they’re creating the ability for players to

make art. You can think of the creators of passive media as composers; they

create something to be consumed by the audience. But, as a game designer,

you’re actually somewhere between a composer and an instrument maker.

Instead of just creating the notes that others will play, you’re also creating

the instrument that they can use to make art. One excellent example of this

kind of game is Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, where the player has a large

vocabulary of moves to draw from and must choose how to string them

together in harmony with the environment to get a high score.21 Just as the

cellist Yo-yo Ma is an artist, a game player can be an artist when

empowered by a game designer who crafts a game for players that they can

play artistically. This can also be seen in other games with large

vocabularies of moves or strategies such as fighting and real-time strategy

games.

21 My good friend Chris Barrios once spent several weeks trying to complete the entire Los

Angeles level of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 in a single trick (meaning that he maintained a trick

combo for the entire two-minute duration of the level). When he finally accomplished it, it was a

thing of beauty!

Attention and Involvement

As mentioned earlier in this chapter, the fantastic game designer Richard

Lemarchand spoke at GDC about attention in his 2012 talk, “Attention, Not

Immersion: Making Your Games Better with Psychology and Playtesting,

the Uncharted Way.”22 The purpose of his talk was to expose confusion

about the use of the word immersion in game design and to demonstrate that

talking about getting and holding an audience’s attention was a much

clearer way of describing what game designers usually seek to do.

22 Lemarchand, Richard. “Attention, Not Immersion: Making Your Games Better with Psychology

and Playtesting, the Uncharted Way” (presented at the Game Developers Conference, San

Francisco, CA, 2012) — Video at https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1015745/Attention-Not-

Immersion-Making-Your — accessed October 16, 2021.

Prior to Lemarchand’s talk, many designers sought to increase immersion in

their games. This led to things like the reduction or removal of the HUD

(heads-up onscreen display) and the minimization of elements that could

pull the player out of the experience of the game. But as Lemarchand

pointed out in his talk, gamers never truly achieve immersion, nor would

they want to. If a gamer actually believed that he was in Nathan Drake’s

position halfway through Uncharted 3, being shot at while clinging to a

cargo net that was hanging out of the open door of a transport plane

thousands of feet above a desert, the player would be absolutely terrified!

One of the critical aspects of the magic circle is that both entry into the

circle and remaining in the circle are voluntary choices made by the player,

and they are always aware that the game is voluntary. (As Suits points out

in The Grasshopper,23 when participation is no longer voluntary, the

experience is no longer a game.)

23 Bernard Suits, The Grasshopper: Games, Life, and Utopia (University of Toronto Press, 1978).

Instead of immersion, Lemarchand seeks to initially gain the player’s

attention and then to maintain hold over it. For the sake of clarity, I will use

attention to describe immediate interest that can be grabbed and

involvement to describe long-term interest that needs to be held (a

distinction that Lemarchand now uses as well). Lemarchand also

differentiates between reflexive attention (the involuntary response that we

have to stimuli around us) and executive attention (which occurs when we

choose to pay attention to something).

According to his talk, the elements of beauty, aesthetics, and contrast are

great at grabbing attention. James Bond films always open with an action

scene for this very reason. They begin in medias res (in the middle of

things) because doing so creates a marked contrast between the boredom of

sitting in the theater waiting for the film to start and the excitement of the

beginning of the film. This kind of attention grab exploits reflexive

attention, the attention shift that is evolutionarily hard-wired into you.

When you see something moving out of the corner of your eye, it will grab

your attention regardless of whether you want it to or not. Then, once the

Bond movie has your attention, it switches to the rather tedious exposition

required to set up the rest of the film. Because the viewer is already hooked

by the film, they will then choose to use executive attention (that is,

attention by choice) to listen to this exposition.

In The Art of Game Design, Jesse Schell presents his theory of the interest

curve. The interest curve is also about grabbing attention, and according to

Schell, a good interest curve looks like Figure 8.3.

Figure 8.3 Interest curve from Jesse Schell’s book

Schell states that in a good interest curve, the audience will enter with a

little interest (A), and then you want to grab them with a “hook” that piques

their interest (B). After you have them interested, you can drop it back

down and steadily build interest with little peaks and valleys (C E and D F,

respectively) that should slowly build to the highest point of interest: the

climax (G). After the climax, the audience’s interest is let back down to (H)

in a denouement as the experience comes to a close. This is actually very

similar to Syd Field’s standard three-act dramatic curve diagram (described

in Chapter 4, “The Inscribed Layer”), and it has been shown to work well

for time spans between a few minutes and a couple of hours. Schell tells us

that this interest curve can be repeated in fractal fashion to cover longer

periods of time. One way this could be accomplished is by designing each

mission of a game to have its own interest curve within the larger structure

of the interest curve of the entire game. However, it’s more complex than

that because the interest that Schell discusses is what I’m calling attention,

and we still need to account for involvement if we want to interest the

player for long periods of time.

Taking a closer look at the terms attention and involvement as I’m using

them, attention is directly paired with reflexive attention (the involuntary

response), whereas involvement is almost exclusively voluntary/executive

attention. Having thought about this for a while, I’ve created the diagram

shown in Figure 8.4 as a synthesis of Lemarchand’s concepts and my

personal experience as both a designer and player.

Figure 8.4 The four elements in relation to attention and involvement

(because technology is largely invisible to the player, it doesn’t register

much on this graph)

As you can see in the figure, aesthetics (in terms of the aesthetic element in

the tetrad) are best at grabbing our attention, and in the case of aesthetics,

that attention is largely reflexive. This is because aesthetics deal directly

with our senses and call for attention.

Narrative and mechanics both require executive attention. As pointed out by

Lemarchand, narrative has a greater ability to grab our attention, but I

disagree with Lemarchand and Jason Rohrer when they state that mechanics

have a greater ability to sustain involvement than narrative. Although a

single movie tends to last only a couple hours, that is also relatively true of

the mechanics in a single session of play. And, in my personal experience, I

have found that just as great mechanics can hold my involvement for more

than 100 hours, so can a series of narratives hold my attention through more

than 100 episodes of a serial television show. The major difference between

mechanics and narrative here is that narrative must be ever evolving

whereas gameplay mechanics can exist unchanged for years and still hold

interest due to the different circumstances of play (for example, consider a

player’s lifelong devotion to chess or Go).

The one thing that I have seen outlast both narrative and mechanics in terms

of long-term involvement is community. When people find that a

community exists around a game, movie, or activity, and they feel part of

that community, they will continue to take part long after the hold of

narrative or mechanics has lost its sway. Community is what kept many

guilds together in Ultima Online long after most people had moved on to

other games. And when the members of those communities did eventually

move on, they more often than not chose—as a community—which new

game to play together, thus continuing the same community through

multiple different online games.

Interesting Decisions

As you read in Chapter 1, Sid Meier has stated that games are (or should

be) a series of interesting decisions, but we questioned at that time what

exactly was meant by interesting. Throughout the book thus far, we have

seen several concepts presented that can help illuminate this.

Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman’s concept of meaningful play as presented

in Chapter 5, “The Dynamic Layer,” gives us some insight into this. To be

meaningful, a decision must be both discernible and integrated:24

24 Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman, Rules of Play (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 34.

Discernible: The player must be able to tell that the game received

and understood their decision (i.e., immediate feedback).

Integrated: The player must believe that their decision will have

some effect on the long-term outcome of the game (i.e., long-term

impact).

In his definition of game, Keith Burgun points out the importance of

decisions being ambiguous:

Ambiguous: A decision is ambiguous for the player if they can

guess at how it might affect the system but can never be sure. The

decision to wager money in the stock market is ambiguous. As a

savvy investor, you should have a pretty decent guess about whether

the value of the stock will go up or down, but the market is so

volatile that you can never know for sure.

Almost all interesting decisions are also double-edged (as in the saying “a

double-edged sword”):

Double-edged: A decision is double-edged when it has both an

upside and a downside. In the previous stock purchase example, the

upside is the longer-term potential to make money, and the downside

is the immediate loss of the resource (money) used to purchase the

stock as well as the potential for the stock to lose value.

Another aspect involved in making a decision interesting is the novelty of

the decision.

Novel: A decision is novel if it is sufficiently different from other

decisions that the player has made recently. In the classic Japanese

roleplaying game (JRPG) Final Fantasy VII (1997 by Square),

combat with a specific enemy changes little throughout the

encounter, meaning that the player has few novel decisions to make.

If the enemy is weak to fire, and the player has enough mana and fire

magic, they will generally attack every round with fire magic until

the enemy is defeated. In contrast, the excellent combat in the JRPG

Grandia III (2005 by Game Arts and Square Enix) makes positioning

and location important for most special attacks, but the player’s

characters move around the field autonomously (independent of

player input). Whenever the player is able to make a decision, time

freezes for them, and they must reevaluate the positions of allies and

enemies as well as predict where they are moving. This autonomous

movement of characters in battle and the importance of position

make every combat decision novel.

The final requirement for interesting decisions is that they must be clear.

Clear: Although it is important for the outcomes of a choice to

have some ambiguity, the choice itself must be clear, and there are

many ways that choices can lack clarity:

A choice can be unclear if there are too many options to choose

from at a given time; the player can have difficulty discerning the

differences between them. This leads to choice paralysis, the

inability to choose because too many options exist.

A choice can be unclear if the player can’t intuit the likely

outcome of the choice. This was often a problem in the dialogue

trees in some older games, which for years just listed the possible

statements that a player could make without any information about

the implied meaning of those statements. In contrast, the dialogue

tree decision wheel in Mass Effect (2007 by BioWare) included

information about both whether a statement would be said in a

friendly or antagonistic way and whether it would extend or

shorten the conversation. This allowed the player to choose an

attitude rather than specific wording of a statement and removed

ambiguity from the dialogue tree.

A choice can also be unclear if the player doesn’t understand the

significance of the choice. One of the great advances in the combat

system of Grandia III over Grandia II allowed threatened

characters to automatically call for help during another character’s

turn. If Yuki is about to be hit by an attack, and Dahna can prevent

it by acting on this turn, Yuki will cry for help at the beginning of

Dahna’s turn. The player may still choose to have Dahna do

something other than prevent the attack, but the game has made it

clear to the player that this is their last chance to prevent the attack

on Yuki.

These six aspects can all be combined together into a decent understanding

of the things that make a decision interesting. An interesting decision is one

that is discernible, integrated, ambiguous, double-edged, novel, and clear.

By making your decisions more interesting, you can increase the appeal of

your mechanics and thereby the player’s long-term involvement in your

game.

Experiential Understanding

The final goal for players that we’ll discuss in this chapter is experiential

understanding, a design goal that is far more accessible to game designers

than designers of any other kind of media.

In 2013, game critic and theorist Mattie Brice released Mainichi,25 the first

game that she had designed and developed herself (see Figure 8.5).

25 You can download and play Mainichi from http://www.mattiebrice.com/mainichi/ — accessed

July 24, 2021.

Figure 8.5 Mainichi by Mattie Brice (2013)

As described by Brice, Mainichi was a personal letter from her to a friend to

help her friend understand what her daily life was like. In her real life, Brice

was a transgender woman living in the Castro district of San Francisco. In

Mainichi, the player takes on the role of Mattie Brice and must choose what

to do to prepare to go out for coffee with a friend: Does she dress nicely, put

on makeup, eat a bite? Each of these decisions change how some (but not

all) of the people around town react to her as she walks to the coffee shop

and orders her drink. Even a simple decision like whether to pay with a

credit card or cash has meaning in the game. (Paying with a credit card will

cause the barista to refer to you as “Ms… er… Mr. Brice” because he reads

Brice’s old, male deadname on the credit card.)

The game is very short, and as a player, you are compelled to repeat it and

see what happens differently based on the seemingly small choices that you

make throughout the game. Because the player’s decisions change how the

character of Mattie is perceived, you feel complicit in her being treated well

or poorly by the people around her. Though some kind of branching chart or

a story structured like the movie Groundhog Day (in which Bill Murray’s

character must relive the same day hundreds of times until he finally gets it

right) could convey the same information about the large implications of the

tiny choices that Brice makes every day, neither would convey a sense of

responsibility to the audience. At this time, it is only through a game (be it a

video game, make-believe, or roleplaying) that a person can actually walk

in the shoes of another and gain insight into what it must be like to make

the decisions that they make. This experiential understanding is one of the

most interesting goals that we can seek to achieve as game designers.

Summary

Everyone making games has different feelings about each of the design

goals presented in this chapter. Some people just want to make fun

experiences, some people want to give players interesting puzzles, some

people want to encourage players to think deeply about a specific topic, and

some people want to give players an arena in which to be empowered.

Regardless of what your reasons are for wanting to make a game, it is time

now to start making them.

The next two chapters are about paper prototyping and playtesting.

Together, prototyping and playtesting form the core of the real work of

game design. In almost any game—especially a digital game—there are

hundreds of small variables that you can tweak to change the experience.

However, in digital games, even seemingly small changes can take

considerable development time to implement. The paper prototyping

strategies presented in the next chapter can help you get from concept to

playable (paper) prototype very quickly and then get you from one

prototype to the next even more rapidly. For many games, this paper

prototyping phase can save you a lot of time in digital development because

you will have already run several paper playtests to find the fun before

writing a single line of code.

Chapter 9. Paper Prototyping

In this chapter, you learn about paper prototyping, one of the best

tools available to game designers seeking to rapidly test and iterate on

game ideas. Although simple to implement, paper prototypes can teach

you a tremendous amount about various aspects of your game, even if

that game will eventually be digital.

By the end of the chapter, you will know the best practices for

implementing paper prototypes and understand the parts of a digital

game that can best be understood and tested through paper, as well as

the aspects of digital games for which paper prototypes are poorly

suited.

The Benefits of Paper Prototyping

Although digital technologies have enabled a whole new world of possibilities

for game development, many designers still find themselves exploring their

initial ideas using traditional paper methods. With computers able to calculate

and display information much faster than a person could draw or calculate by

hand, you may be wondering why this is. It largely comes down to two factors:

the speed and ease of implementation. However, other benefits that you should

consider include the following:

Initial development speed: For quickly throwing together a game,

nothing beats paper. You can grab some dice and some 3x5 note cards

and make a game in very little time. Even when you have a lot of

experience as a game designer, starting on a new digital game project can

take quite a bit of time if it’s completely different from anything you’ve

done before.

Iteration speed: Making changes to paper games is very fast; in fact,

it’s even possible to make changes to paper games while you’re playing

them. Because of the ease of changes, paper prototypes are a great fit for

game brainstorming at the beginning of preproduction (when large

changes to the project can happen often). If a paper prototype isn’t

working, making a change can take as little as a few minutes.

Low technical barrier to entry: Because very little technical

knowledge or artistic talent is required to make a paper prototype, anyone

on the game development team can take part in the process. This is a way

to get great ideas from people on your team who would not be able to

effectively contribute to a digital prototype.

Collaborative prototyping: Because of the low barrier to entry and the

ability to iterate rapidly, it’s possible to collaboratively create and modify

a paper prototype in a way that is not yet possible for digital prototypes.

A group of people from across your team can work together on a paper

prototype and share ideas quickly. As an added benefit, bringing people

from across your game development team into the design process in this

way can help to increase their buy-in for the entirety of the project and

can serve as a fantastic team-building activity.

Focused prototyping and testing: A paper prototype of a digital game

is going to be very different from the final digital product. But this can

work to your advantage because it allows you to test specific elements of

your game without your testers getting hung up on details. In her 1992

SIGCHI talk, Yin Yin Wong—a member of the Human Interface Group

at Apple—stated that “people cannot avoid critiquing the ‘look’ if the

representation they are viewing is a definite visual statement.” To avoid

this, she recommended drawing a rough sketch of a computer interface

on paper, scanning the paper, and then making working UI prototypes

from the scanned images. Because the sketched and scanned images of

UI elements like buttons and menus were so obviously not the final look

that Apple would choose for the UI, testers didn’t get hung up on the look

of the buttons and instead focused on the usability of the interface, which

is what Apple was interested in testing.1 A paper prototype can help

direct the attention of your testers in the same way so that they don’t get

hung up on the look of the prototype but instead focus on the specific

aspect of gameplay that you intend to test.

1 Yin Yin Wong, “Rough and ready prototypes: lessons from graphic design” in Posters and Short Talks

of the 1992 SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’92). (Association for

Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1992), 83–84. DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1145/1125021.1125094 — accessed July 24, 2021.

Paper Prototyping Tools

You might want to have handy several tools for paper prototyping. You can

make a paper prototype from almost anything, but these tools can help make the

process go faster:

Large sheets of paper: At most office supply stores, you can get easel-

sized sheets of paper (something like 24” wide by 36” tall). These often

come in a pad of several sheets, and some have a mild Post-it®-like

adhesive on the back of each sheet to stick them to walls and such. You

can also often find large sheets of paper inscribed with a square or

hexagonal grid. See the “Movement on Different Grid Types” sidebar for

information about why you might want to choose a hexagonal or square

grid and how to handle free movement on an open-grid game board.

Dice: Most people have some d6 dice (normal six-sided dice) sitting

around. As a game designer, it’s also really good to have some of the

other varieties. Your local game store should have sets for sale that

include all the dice normally used for d20 roleplaying games including

2d6 (2 six-sided dice), 1d8, 1d12, 1d20, and percentile dice (2d10 with

one marked 0-9 and the other marked 00-90; rolled together, they give

you a number between 00 and 99). Chapter 11, “Math and Game

Balance,” includes a lot of information about different kinds of dice and

what the probability space of their randomness looks like. For example,

with 1d6, you have an even chance of any number from 1 to 6, but with

2d6 there are 6 different ways to roll a 7 (a 6/36 chance) but only one

way to roll a 12 (a 1/36 chance).

Cards: Cards are a fantastic prototyping tool because they are so

malleable. Create cards numbered 1–6, and you have a 1d6 deck. If you

shuffle before every draw, it acts just like a 1d6, but if you draw all the

cards before reshuffling, then you’re guaranteed to get one each of 1, 2,

3, 4, 5, and 6 before seeing any number for a second time.

As shown in Figure 9.1, if your game includes player movement, you

will need to make choices about how players can move across the board.

As depicted in image A, on a square grid, diagonal movement moves the

player almost 50 percent further than orthogonal movement. (According

to the Pythagorean theorem, the diagonal distance is or roughly

Movement on Different Grid Types

1.414.) However, movement to any adjacent hex in a hexagonal grid is

the same, regardless of which hex you choose (image B).

Figure 9.1 Movement systems

Image C shows a simple alternative movement system across a square

grid that can be used in board games to still allow diagonal movement

yet prevent abuse thereof. Players are allowed to move diagonally with

every other movement. This evens out the distances somewhat and

makes the possible movement within a specific number of moves

roughly circular. The purple lines on diagram C show two different

possible paths of four moves each. This movement system is used in

Dungeons & Dragons by Wizards of the Coast.

Card sleeves: Most gaming stores sell several different styles of card

sleeves. Card sleeves were initially developed to protect baseball cards,

and they were extended to the gaming industry with the rise of collectible

card games like Magic: The Gathering in the ’90s. Each card sleeve is a

protective plastic cover for an individual card, and there’s enough room

inside of them for both a regular card and a slip of paper. This is great for

prototyping because it means that you can print the cards for your

prototype on regular printer paper and then put them into a sleeve in front

of a regular playing card. The regular card will give the card enough

stiffness to be shuffled without the time and expense of writing or

printing on card stock. The card sleeves can also ensure that all the card

backs look uniform, or alternatively, several sets of card sleeves can be

used to keep different decks of designed cards separate.

3x5 note cards: Cut in half, 3x5 note cards are a great size for a deck

of cards. At their regular size, they’re fantastic for brainstorming. Some

stores now sell 3x5 cards that have already been cut in half (to 3“x2.5”).

Post-it notes: These simple little sticky notes are fantastic for quickly

arranging and sorting ideas.

Whiteboard: Nothing says brainstorming like a whiteboard. Be sure to

have lots of colors of markers available. Whiteboards tend to get erased

often, so be sure to snap a digital photo of anything you write on one that

is at all worth keeping. If you have a whiteboard tabletop or a vertical

whiteboard that is magnetic, you can also draw a game board on it, but I

tend to prefer large sheets of paper for game boards because they won’t

be erased.

Pipe cleaners/LEGO: Both of these can be used for the same purpose:

quickly building little things. These could be playing pieces, set pieces,

or really anything you can think of. LEGO bricks are a lot sturdier, but

pipe cleaners are much cheaper and more flexible.

Hexagonal grids are often used for military simulation board games

where an accurate representation of distances and movement is critical.

However, most buildings in the real world are rectangular, so they don’t

fit as well on a hexagonal board. The choice of which to use is up to you

as a designer.

A notebook: As a designer, you should always have a notebook handy.

I like the pocket-size Moleskine with 192 unlined pages, but every

designer has their own favorite. The key element of your notebook is that

it needs to be small enough to carry with you and large enough that you

won’t be filling it up and replacing it every few weeks. Any time

someone plays your game prototype, you should be taking notes. You

always think you’ll remember the important things, but that’s often not

the case.

Paper Prototyping for Interfaces

One example of a great place to us a paper prototype is when making interface

decisions. For instance, the diagram in Figure 9.2 shows some different screens

from a Graphical User Interface (GUI) mockup of an options menu. Each

playtester would only be shown one screen at a time, starting with #1, the

Options Menu. While shown screen #1, the playtester would be instructed to

“Press the selections you would make to turn the subtitles on.” (You would

encourage the playtesters to actually touch the paper as if they were touching a

touchscreen.)

Figure 9.2 A simple paper GUI prototype

Some playtesters might press the Video button, whereas others might press

Audio (and a few might press Game). After the user makes a selection, the #1

sheet of paper would be replaced with the menu of their selection (for example,

#2 Video Options). Then, presumably, the playtester would press the Subtitles:

on / OFF button to switch the subtitles on, which would cause #2 to be replaced

with #4 Video Options.

One important thing to note here is that subtitles are available to be changed on

both the video and sound options screens. For testing, this works well because

regardless of which of the two options are chosen by the player (Video or

Audio), you can then subsequently test whether the on / OFF capitalization

clearly conveys that the subtitles are currently turned off. This also allows you

to see whether most of your playtesters think of subtitles as an Audio or Video

setting.

A Paper Prototype Example

In this section of the chapter, I’ll take you through the process of designing an

example paper prototype for a digital game. You’ll see it from the initial phase

of ideation through to the creation of a clear, limited paper prototype that can

teach us something useful for the final digital version of the game.

Game Concept — 2D Adventure Game Level

In the Dungeon Delver chapters of this book (Chapters 35 and 36), I’ll lead you

through programming a top-down 2D adventure game based on the original

Legend of Zelda for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), which will

culminate in the creation of a level editor for the game. In games like this, one

of the key difficult level design questions has to do with locks and keys.

As a designer, you’ll lock some doors and place keys to those locks in dungeon

rooms in the expectation that your players will approach the dungeon in a

specific way; however, players are often unpredictable. Take a look at the two

identical versions of the first dungeon from The Legend of Zelda shown in

Figure 9.3. The green line in the top map shows a completionist player’s path

through the dungeon. Here, the player has collected and used every key and

every item in the dungeon (including the bow in B1 and the boomerang in D3).

This is generally how new players will experience the level, but it’s not the only

way to the goal at the end.